Work Text:
maybe it's time we found out
what the daughter of the mightiest god
can do.
look to your kingdoms.
i am coming for them all.
e.h.
Hermione grows up knowing she has to work hard. Her parents can afford to send her to a good school, but the grades will have to be earned on her own. She has to prove she deserves to be there even though she’s the only one in her class whose skin tone is closer to the dark blazer of their uniform than the white collared shirt beneath it.
When she comes home, the house is quiet - her parents are still at work. She walks to the library after her homework is done, curls up on the one soft chair in the young adult section, and reads, reads, reads. She’d skipped picture books and went straight to the ones that were all text so that sometimes, when the author only describes brown eyes and dark hair, Hermione can imagine that she looks a bit like her.
On the first day of the summer holidays, an elderly woman she doesn’t recognize arrives on their doorstep. It’s a Saturday, so her father is the one to answer when the doorbell rings. The woman introduces herself as Professor Minerva McGonagall, and wasn’t that a name. Minerva is the Roman equivalent of the Greek goddess Athena, Hermione is the daughter of Helen of Troy. She can appreciate a mythological reference.
Professor McGonagall explains that she is a teacher at a boarding school called Hogwarts. Hogwarts, apparently, is for children with magic. People like Hermione.
Hermione looks down at herself and the paper cut scars along her fingertips. She thinks about her current school, she thinks about the shelf of fantasy books at the library, and she knows where she would rather be long before her parents finally accept that the professor is telling the truth.
She watches the older woman turn a little glass bird on the shelf into a real bird that sings a short song before turning it back into glass, and asks breathlessly, “I’ll be able to do that too?”
“Yes,” McGonagall smiles. “Much more than a trick like that, but yes.”
When she visits Diagon Alley, Hermione hates that the first thing the shop clerk in the apothecary tries to sell her is a potion to “tame her hair.” She likes her hair the way it is, curls and frizz, heavy around her shoulders.
“No thank you, I just need the supplies for First Year Potions at Hogwarts, please,” she replies, trying to be polite. The clerk sighs and waves her wand to summon a bundle of items off the shelf behind her - presumably a pre-packaged selection, since all the students need the same things.
“We do mail order too, dear, if you change your mind later,” the clerk tells her with pursed lips, ringing up the purchase. This time, Hermione grits her teeth and says nothing at all.
She thought the wizarding world would be different.
Hermione makes sure to read every book on her supply list before the summer is over. She’s so excited to learn all of it, transfiguration from Professor McGonagall and charms and potions, but especially history. That’s always been her favorite subject, and now there’s a whole new world’s history to learn. She even buys more recent books that weren’t included in the list just so she can be fully up to date.
She reads about the war. The wars, really. The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts covers The Dark Lord but also a dozen dark lords and ladies and would-be-emperors before him. She reads about the atrocities they committed and the horrors they achieved and what it was all for.
Blood purity.
Apparently, before she’s even started her training as witch, Hermione has been deemed not good enough .
She thought the wizarding world would be different.
Even one of the founders of the school she’s about to go to was a wizarding supremacist. She tries to be reasonable. Hogwarts is a thousand years old. She reads History of Magic and Bathilda Bagshot’s explanation of the medieval witch burnings. She flips through Hogwarts: A History and tries to understand why Salazar Slytherin wanted to make Hogwarts exclusive to purebloods. Of course there had to be some worry, that muggleborns might leak the secret of magic...or that their families wouldn’t take the news well. Bagshot wrote about how real witches and wizards who got caught used a Flame Freezing Charm, but what if it was a child who couldn’t defend themselves?
Still. Still, she is so tired of being different. It’s a thousand years later, and it seems very little has changed. When her parents ask her about what she’s read over dinner, she only tells them about interesting household charms or the magical ceiling at Hogwarts, and not that they might be sending her to school where she still won’t fit in. A world that will view her as lesser for the circumstances of her birth.
She’s most irritated by how all of the authors use You-Know-Who. No, she doesn’t know who, which is why she’s reading all these books. How is she supposed to know who The Dark Lord or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is unless they actually write his name down? Even Modern Magical History and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century do it, and those were written after the end of the war.
The figure they do name frequently is Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived. Wizards really does have an odd penchant for titles.
According to the dates, he’s almost the same age as her. Maybe she’ll meet him at Hogwarts.
The thing is, You-Know-Who lost the war. Before him, Grindelwald was defeated by Albus Dumbledore, who is now the headmaster at Hogwarts. And Hermione thought - she really did - that it would be a little more like her own world, where people acknowledged that Hitler was evil and his ideology was terrible and the sort of people who supported him couldn’t say so in public . She’d thought that she would have that much protection, at least.
She’s not been at Hogwarts a month when she starts getting spells that slice her book bag open to spill her things across the floor between classes, making her late to Potions. Snape sneers and takes 20 points from Gryffindor. Two days later, a third year in a green and silver tie spits mudblood in her face and casually knocks into the table she's sitting at in the library. Her inkwell wobbles, and then spills itself across her essay. It’s not a word that she’ll find in a book - it’s not even a word she dares ask an adult for the meaning of - but the look on his face tells her enough. The downcast eyes and silence from bystanders tells her the rest.
The wizarding world is no different at all.
Hermione shares a dorm room with Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil and Fay Dunbar. Lavender and Parvati get along straightaway, as if they’ve known each other forever. They share nail polish and sit together in classes and talk late into the night about things that Hermione really just doesn’t care for. Fay doesn’t seem interested in their conversations either, but all she talks about is Quidditch. After an awkward attempt at discussing it with Hermione, who admits she’s never even seen the sport and barely understands the rules, Fay leaves her alone too.
Hermione studies and studies and studies. She raises her hand in every class. She ignores the snickers of the Slytherin students and even that of her own housemates. She smiles ambivalently when a Ravenclaw scowls at her for getting the best marks on a test. A Hufflepuff nods at her kindly when they share a table in the library.
They, at least, respect hard work.
She has to be better than all of them. She has to know the answer before the question is even asked. She will not let them take her for granted just because she wasn’t born to the ‘right kind’ of family.
Hermione gets called know-it-all and teacher’s pet and a dozen other nicknames meant to be cruel, but at least these are names that she has earned. None of them are as nasty as the alternative. Sometimes they’re even muttered with begrudging admiration. She’s making them acknowledge her for who she is and not what they assume based on her blood status or the color of her skin or the skirts she wears beneath her robes.
Months into the school year, Lavender looks over at Hermione in their room. The latter is sitting cross-legged in pajamas on her bed, texts stacked high on the nightstand beside her.
“Why do you spend all your time in those books?” asked Lavender, genuinely curious. She can’t understand how Hermione can bear to read even more than what’s assigned in class. None of it is even about anything interesting.
Hermione stares back at her.
Lavender is flighty and fulfills the minimum expected length for essays before going back to look at fashion illustrations in the mail order catalogs that she and Parvati pool their money for. Lavender rarely studies, but recognizes potions ingredients because her mother has mentioned how certain ones are good for the skin and cautioned her against the ones that are extremely poisonous. She knows about basic defensive and warding spells from watching her father cast them around the house. Lavender is pureblood and takes this world for granted.
Hermione tries to explain. That there are all sorts of things people just expect you to know because they’re common knowledge in the wizarding world. Even if they don’t know how to cast, all the wizard-raised first years at least know of the existence of different spells and potions and magical creatures. And recent history - there’s all manner of conflicting records on the war. Most students know about it from what their families have told them, and don’t have to try piecing together a truthful timeline from newspaper articles and vague books.
Magical academia has very little interest in writing to or from an outsider’s perspective.
It’s not that she doesn’t want to talk about normal things with her classmates, sometimes. It’s just that her idea of normal and their idea of normal are completely different. The things that seem boring to Lavender are new and unheard of to Hermione. And how is she supposed to find the time to learn about fashion and music when she still hasn’t even figured out who He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is supposed to be?
Lavender blinks back at her, open mouthed.
They’re not best friends. They probably won’t ever be.
But now, they trade information. They make a rule for their dorm, that there are no stupid questions here. If someone asks something, the others will do their best to answer without making fun.
Parvati admits she doesn’t try as hard as she might because her twin is already ‘the smart one’. She can’t compete with Padma, so she acts like she just cares more about other things; and she does, but that doesn’t mean that sometimes she doesn’t want to do better. She’s just afraid to fail in class, because she always get that look - that look that says Padma has already done the spell correctly during the Ravenclaws’ session or turned in a much better essay.
Hermione helps them both with wand movements and enunciation. She’s read everything she can about how to cast spells because she doesn’t know what’s important. She doesn’t know what it’s supposed to look like or sound like, so she goes exactly by the textbook. Sometimes, Parvati or Lavender are imitating what they’ve seen adult witches do, but adults get lazy and take shortcuts and can get away with it because they’ve been doing magic for much longer. They’re just learning. She teaches them to start with the basics.
Parvati shows her charms to keep her uniform clean and neatly pressed, so her robes and skirts will flutter in the wind but won’t ever flip, not even if a boy tries to make it by magic, and how to spell more room into her pockets and book bag. Lavender tells her about potions that witches can use when they start menstruating and how to lock her trunk so that even Alohomora won’t open it. Anyone who tries breaking in will get a nasty surprise.
She also tries to offer some spells to straighten her hair, but Hermione shakes her head. Her bushy curls will stay the way they are.
Parvati nods at her. She spent a childhood putting up with her grandmother casting layers of sun-protection spells on her and Padma, saw rows of potions and cosmetics that promised to lighten your skin on her mother’s dresser. She knows something about being told to change yourself.
They share their magazines and romance novels too. Hermione doesn’t read them on her own, but sometimes on the weekends they drag her away from the school books and they all lie down together on the carpet and look at the pictures or read chapters aloud to each other. Hermione sometimes wrinkles her nose and asks, “Is that actually possible?”
Lavender giggles, “Probably not.”
Parvati shakes her head gently and says, exasperated, “That’s not the point.”
One night, they finally tell her what You-Know-Who stands for. They write it down.
Lord Voldemort.
Hermione still doesn’t really understand why nobody says his name. Yes, he was evil and terribly powerful, but it’s just a name .
For once, Fay comes and sits with them. Fay is half-blood; her father is muggleborn like Hermione. His stories of the war are different from the ones that Lavender and Parvati have heard.
She tells Hermione about fear. About having your neighbors and friends locked up and not knowing if you were next. About not knowing who to trust, when people you’d known all your life could be under the Imperius. How the Dark Lord cast a Taboo curse so that his Death Eaters could find people who spoke his name. It even broke wards and other protections people had on their homes - what would have been simple superstition in the muggle world was a very real danger in the magical one. And at the time, everyone did know what a whispered “You-Know-Who” meant. It was impossible not to.
Hermione tries to understand in the way that she tried to understand why Salazar Slytherin wanted to keep people like her out of Hogwarts. She can see why it happened when it did, but she doesn’t see any reason for it to keep happening. The books could at least write it down, for historical record. How is anyone in the future going to know that You-Know-Who refers to Voldemort when everyone who lived through the war is gone?
How is anything in this world supposed to change if people don’t learn from the past?
At some point, Hermione decides that she’s going to make things change. She’s tired of of being sneered at and not taken seriously, of books that aren’t meant for her, of history repeating itself.
The wizarding world will be a different place when she’s done with it.