Chapter Text
“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno
The small girl desperately attempted to breathe through hiccups and tears, rubbing her eyes in a distraught manner as she tried to make sense of the world.
“Hermione, do you understand what I am trying to tell you? Your Mummy and Daddy have passed away in an accident, and you won’t be able to see them for a long, long time.”
The small girl looked blearily at the tall woman crouched beside the hospital bed. She was a stranger who painted her lips to look as red as apples, whose grip on her shoulder was too tight to be comforting. Hermione understood, taking in the woman’s rigid expression, that this person was not here to ‘help’.
“I want to go home,” she stated bluntly, watching closely as the woman’s expression shuttered.
“You will have a new home. You are going to be staying with your Aunt and Uncle in Exeter. Do you know where that is?”
Hermione’s gaze at the woman narrowed in confusion and a bit of disdain. “I’ve never met my Uncle. He and my Daddy don’t get along.” She shook her head, and maintained, “I need to go home.”
The woman ignored her. “It’s in Devon. You’re going to love it there, I hear the countryside is simply lovely.”
The girl’s mouth deepened into a frown, and she wiped away at her runny nose almost absentmindedly (using a handkerchief because she was a young lady and not a ragamuffin). “No, I need to go home. In Hampstead. To my books, and my stuffed dragon, and my new pink curtains, and my… my-” She wanted to say parents, but the word wouldn’t come out, and tears poured out no matter how tightly she tried to close her eyelids.
The woman’s mouth pinched unpleasantly, and she huffed. Hermione easily recognized the sign of aggravation; her tutors adopted the same attitude when they felt she was asking too many questions, or being too ‘difficult’. “You will have an opportunity to grab a few of your belongings after you are discharged. But you will not be able to stay.”
Hermione could not comprehend this, did not want to comprehend this. She was a child that was greatly comforted by a regular schedule, thriving off the consistency of a routine. She could barely consider a future without her parents much less one without the familiarity of her home and favorite possessions. “No!” she dissented, unsurprised when the strength of her emotion caused all of the lights in the small hospital room to burst.
The woman jumped, and Hermione enjoyed a shot of vindictive satisfaction as she watched the aggrieved woman march out of the room muttering about the sorry state of electrical wiring in these old hospitals.
Hermione’s victory was short-lived. In almost no time at all, she was being ushered into a small floral dress, white socks, and Mary Janes by the attending nurse and discharged to the unpleasant woman with painted lips. The drive to her house was oppressive, and the way the woman manhandled her out of the back seat and into the house was irritating. Then the woman had the gall to restrict her to five books and one soft toy, as she filled the majority of the space in her small luggage bag with clothes.
Hermione did her best to oppose the awful stranger. She hid in her mother’s closet, stifling her tears as she breathed in her mother’s flowery scent from behind a wall of long dresses. And when the woman eventually found her and pulled Hermione from the space with a bruising grip on her wrist, Hermione fought and struggled, shrieking against the woman.
She was slapped across the face.
Hermione stared at the woman in startled surprise, just as the pain registered in her cheek.
“If you do not stop acting like a brat, we will leave and you won’t be allowed to bring anything,” the woman snarled at the girl in frustration, “Choose wisely.”
Hermione forlornly grabbed her stuffed dragon, Falkor, and several of her favorite novels. She also snatched a photo of her and her parents from the living room, as well as her father’s watch and her mother’s pearl necklace and bottle of perfume. The woman watched with impatient, narrowed eyes, but said nothing as the carpet bag was filled with these trinkets and packed away.
The drive to Devon was somehow more tense, the very air suffocating. Hermione’s grip on the plush toy tightened as she desperately smelled the bedraggled white beast, breathing in the scent of home as she stared forlornly out of the car window. She did not dare to read during the car ride like she normally would. This woman was mean, and Hermione could not afford to not pay attention.
They eventually drove up to a small cottage settled on the edge of a large village. It was idyllic, made of pretty white stone and containing round, green windows. The chimney merrily puffed white smoke and flowers bloomed from the foot path, and Hermione imagined that the house was something from a fairytale. It gave her hope that the inside would be just as merry.
She should have realized that appearances can be deceiving and that most fairytales necessitate a great deal of suffering for the protagonists. Just within the first five minutes of her visit, her Aunt and Uncle made it abundantly clear that they did not like children. Her uncle, a tall man with dark features, whose wildly curly locks were kept carefully controlled in a sheared haircut, bent down and stated quite clearly, “Hermione. You are six years old, and as such we expect you to be able to care for yourself. Your Aunt and I are both extremely busy professionals who do not have the time or patience to coddle.”
Her new Aunt, a blonde woman that might be pretty indeed if not for the disgusted turn of her mouth and dark, confining business clothes, nodded severely in agreement. “Just so. We also will not tolerate little hands grabbing at our things. If you need something, you will ask. Otherwise, expect to be disciplined.”
Hermione carefully nodded, wary of what these two might consider discipline. She distinctly recalled her father’s rants about the callousness and cruelty of his brother in his business practices that eventually led to their parting. The girl considered this as they dismissed the painted woman and she was brought to her new room. She quickly hid her dismay when she realized that it consisted of a simple cot set up underneath a dirty round window in what was clearly the broom closet. There was barely enough room to stand, and Hermione expected that her packed carpet bag would take up most of the remaining space.
Her uncle seemed somewhat embarrassed, but hid it underneath a pique of anger. “We made the decision not to have children years ago, and as such did not purchase a property with any additional rooms. And we could not have predicted that my idiot of a brother would get himself killed and leave us with his spawn. Therefore, this will have to do.”
Hermione could only nod as the man all but threw the carpet bag at her feet and closed the door behind him. The sound of the metallic click of a lock echoed softly in the stone space.
She cried into the small pillow at the head of small cot. She couldn’t help it. She cried at the loss- no longer would she be able to share hot chocolate with her Daddy on the odd occasion she was woken up from a nightmare. No longer would her mother absentmindedly caress her full head of hair as she read her to sleep at night. No longer would she be able to snuggle into warm pink blankets with a line of plushies as she taught them all that she had learned that day from the tutors (dictated with her best teacher voice).
One of the individuals in the cottage must have gotten annoyed at the sound of her tears, for there was a loud thud against the wood door of the closet door, and an equally loud, “Stop crying! I’m trying to concentrate!”
Hermione took careful breaths to reduce the noise of her sobs, instead crying as silently as she could curled in a ball around the white, stuffed dragon.
It took several days for Hermione to settle into her new routine. She was locked in her ‘new room’ a majority of the time, only allowed out occasionally for meals and to use the restroom. She was required to cook herself breakfast and lunch, and she was only allowed to eat dinner by herself in the kitchen, as neither adult thought her inclusion at the dining room table was ‘appropriate’.
This could not last. Hermione was a very precocious little girl who got easily bored, and there were only so many times she could read her five books, favorites though they were. She bravely came up to her Aunt after breakfast one day and asked if she could have a book to read.
The woman’s face instantly soured. “I’m afraid we do not have any books suitable for children here. You will simply have to make do with what you brought.”
Hermione attempted to reason with her. “I do not mind reading adult books! My mother introduced me to non-fiction a long time ago. I can make my way through.”
The women harrumphed indignantly, and gestured at the girl’s fingers, which were still sticky from attempting to navigate the jam jar with a spoon, as she was not allowed a butter knife. “Well, I do not trust such sticky fingers anywhere near my bookshelf. Stay away, understand?”
Hermione quickly decided that she would simply have to nab something for herself when they were not looking. She plotted out the act of thievery with great aplomb- listening through the door in order to understand their schedule, and with a bit of intuition she was able to grab an extra key to the broom closet that hung on the landing outside the kitchen. She quietly unlocked the door Saturday night, after the two adults had indulged in a couple of glasses of wine and retired to bed. Hermione carefully tiptoed into the living space of the dark cottage, meekly slinking around dark shadows vaguely shaped like furniture with clumsy unfamiliarity. She grabbed a book at random, one she did not think that would be missed on the bookshelf and shuffled the books around, so the gap was no longer obvious.
But she had underestimated how obsessive compulsive her Aunt was. On retrospect, she should have suspected considering the immaculate state of the cottage and the woman’s appearance- everything was clean enough to sparkle, and the woman herself was as perfectly put together as a new doll. But Hermione was a small child, unable to understand such strange adult behavior. Barely several hours into the morning and the woman tore into the little room, upending all of her belongings only to find the odd book tucked underneath the cot. Then she smacked the little girl around while shrieking indignantly.
The woman eventually called for her husband. “The little brat stole one of my books!”
Her uncle took his time pacing into the room. “Is this true?”
Hermione eyes were wide as she nodded around tears. “I just wanted something else to read. I was going to put it back!”
But the man had already grabbed her arm and wrestled her over his knee. His hand came down on top of her small body with harsh smacks that caused pain to radiate from her sore bottom and lower back. “What did we say at the beginning of your stay? You are not. To. Touch. Our. Things!” He punctuated each of these words with a loud smack.
She cried out, but both adults ignored her tears and eventually slammed the door behind them. She was not permitted out for the remainder of the day, forced to forego meals and desperately attempt to not pee on herself.
This moment signified a change in the household. No longer was she some forgotten piece of furniture who needed sustenance to survive, now she was a bad girl. And this new moniker trailed after her as she moved through the cottage and seemed to justify a transition in the way she was treated. Bad girls deserve painful pinches when they do not respond quickly enough. Bad girls deserve smacks when their attempts at cleaning do not match the ‘exacting standards of the household’. Bad girls deserve to be ignored and forced to skip meals, as the adults couldn’t be bothered.
Eventually Hermione was forced to act. Or rather, plot out her attempt to run away, as she refused to simply stand still and submit. It helped that she was encouraged by the many novels she had consumed in her short childhood which signified that leaving would be the natural start to her next adventure, despite her status as a child merely six years of age.
See, Hermione was the kind of child that believed that books held all of the answers to the universe. She distinctly recalls her father telling her at some point that every problem anyone has ever had was more than likely recorded, and if she just searched long enough she was more than likely to find their attempts at a solution. And in her short life, the many books she had read pointed to the possibility of escape for a child under just her sort of circumstances.
It was the child that was suffering that was granted the privilege of visiting a whole new world and bettering their existence. She sat in the miserable excuse for a cot in thought as she recalled Lucy’s initial venture through the cabinet in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and the terrifying circumstances of the war that led up to that venture. She recalls Bastian in The Neverending Story, an unfortunate boy whose mother had passed and who was bullied terribly in school, before he was swept up into the fantasy novel of Atreyu and her beloved Falkor. And she considers Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, who was only able to embrace true friendship and the magic of growth after her parents passed away in a terrifying earthquake in India.
Hermione was sure that this would be the start of her new adventure. It had to be. Because otherwise her daily encounters with belittlement, smarting smacks, and painful pinches were somehow her life now. And that was unacceptable.
She carefully planned for her adventure. She knew she would eventually have to physically leave (she had already carefully inspected every nook and cranny in the cottage for a magical entrance, and realized there was none to be found), but she was determined to be smart about it. Adventures were long, troublesome things for the unprepared, and Hermione was determined to not be caught unaware. So she pilfered scraps of food, and cleaned the odd waterskin she found perusing boxes in the broom closet, and strapped on her small leather boots the day she planned to leave.
The key to the room had been taken and hidden away, so her only opportunity to sneak out would be when she was allowed out. This unfortunately meant she would have to leave her carpet bag and a majority of her clothes, but she packed a small satchel with her books and parent’s belongings with care, and hugged Falkor closely. At the sound of the lock turning for breakfast, she waited several minutes before tiptoeing into the kitchen. The she grabbed the bread and cheese on the counter and left through the back door, careful to muffle the noise of the solid wood closing behind her.
Hermione looked around at the green trees shimmering with sunlight in delight, and breathed in the smell of freshly cut grass. Ah. Freedom at last. Hermione carefully made her way down the dirt path as she imagined where she could end up. Somewhere magical, she was sure. After all, all those strange occurrences that happened when she was upset had to mean something?
After several hours of traversing different dirt roads at random, she stopped to munch on a bit of fruit underneath a large tree. She watched a line of ants curiously as she shuffled along the bark, wondering what resources ants could possibly collect from a tree. Perhaps moisture from the roots underneath?
And then Hermione was once again on her way. For hours she walked, until her feet became sore and her toes pinched unpleasantly in the restricted leather, and the fading heat of the afternoon left her floral dress fairly soaked with sweat. And just as the afternoon drifted off into the evening, she began to despair. Shouldn’t she have found the magical entrance by now? It didn’t normally take this long, surely?
It was just as these sorts of despondent thoughts threatened to bring tears to her eyes that she heard a loud yell. Spinning around in the direction of the woods, Hermione watched with wide eyes as a small boy with red hair fell from the sky, grasping what appeared to be a disobedient broomstick. He landed in an awkward pile at her feet, and Hermione wasted little time crouching forward to determine if he was still alive.
She reached down to gently palm his lightly freckled face, and released a relieved sigh when she felt his breath warm the inside of her wrist. And then the boy grunted and looked up towards her a bit fearfully. Upon realizing that she was equally small and quite harmless, his face transformed into a wide, mischievous grin.
It took Hermione only moments to place him. Red hair, brown eyes, delicate freckles, a ‘beautiful boy with a beautiful smile’ who flew down to meet her. “Peter Pan!” she announced in excitement.
He gazed at her curiously, his head tilted. “Peter Pan?”
And Hermione, overcome with her eagerness, came forward to grasp onto his hands. Excited that this was to be her new adventure, she squeezed his palms and fantasized about meeting beautiful mermaids, and stoic Indians, and swashbuckling pirates. She desperately tried to think of something she could say that would grant her the privilege of joining him in Neverland. “I never want to grow up!” she stated quite clearly, gazing at him intently.
The boy seemed to take her intensity in stride. “You’re in good company then,” he announced cockily, still grinning, “Adults are boring.”
Hermione let go of his hands as she went to pick up her forgotten white dragon. Clutching the soft toy a bit apprehensively, she asked, “Does this mean you will teach me how to fly?”
This was the first step, of course, so she would be able to traverse the sky with him, until they flew to the second star to the right and beyond.
The boy’s eyes scrunched up a bit as he seemed to consider her, and then he looked back at the broomstick. “We could try? Although this old thing has been giving me trouble.”
Hermione looked at him curiously, and then the broomstick with bemusement. “We aren’t going to use pixie dust?”
The boy laughed at her, and if his laugh had not been so wonderful, she was sure it would have been upsetting. As it was, she still couldn’t help but pout as he wheezed, “Sure, you can eat pixie dust, but it won’t make you fly. Someone was clearly trying to have you on.”
Hermione’s frown deepened. “Oh no, really?” Then she stopped and acknowledged how easily jealous Tinkerbell was, and considered the likelihood that all fairies were such emotionally unstable creatures. It was probably for the best. She instead turned towards the broom and asked a clarifying question. She was, after all, still trying to determine exactly what kind of adventure was in store for her. Perhaps it was not Peter Pan after all? “So, I can fly using the broomstick? Like a proper witch?”
The boy gave her a careful look, and then asked, “Well, you are a witch, aren’t you? You made it past the Muggle-Repulsion Wards at least.”
There was a bit of suspicion Hermione could see in his eyes that made her a bit afraid. After all, this mysterious boy had the power to send her away, and that was unacceptable. She was quick to embrace this new identity as a result. “I am a witch,” she announced with false confidence, and then looked at the broomstick through worried eyes and admitted, “But I don’t know how to fly.”
The boy quickly recovered with that assertion, his eyes bright and his smile somehow brighter. “That’s fine, my sister can’t fly yet either.”
They were interrupted by a loud yell that echoed through the foliage. “Fred! Are you alright?”
The red-headed boy yelled back, “Over here George!”
And then suddenly there were two of them. They looked each other over, joked about the old broomstick with identical grins, and then turned to face her. So many of their actions were synchronized that Hermione couldn’t help but turn towards the new boy, this ‘George’, and ask, “Are you Peter’s shadow?”
The boy gave her an affronted look. “I am no one’s shadow,” he stated around a pout.
“But there are two of you?”
There shouldn’t be two Peter Pans. The discrepancy with pixie dust could be rationalized away as the author indulging in a bit of artistic license, but she was sure that Peter Pan having a twin would have been mentioned. She couldn’t help but ask, because she found in her heart of hearts that she wanted him to be Peter Pan.
The first boy, this ‘Fred’, budged his way in front of the other boy protectively. “We’re twins,” he explained around a frown. “And my name is Fred, not Peter.”
At first, Hermione was deeply unhappy with this development. Her parents had discovered very early on that she was the sort of person who appreciated it when things were explained or played out quite literally. She did not have an inclination towards poetry, or appreciating ‘the spirit of the thing rather than the thing itself’, though goodness knows her mother tried. But somehow inherently ashamed and displeased with the frowns both boys were wearing (something inside her was assured that they should always be smiling) Hermione instead considered that there were no witches in Peter Pan and thus she had simply incorrectly assigned herself the wrong story.
And contemplating the two of them, and what she knew of Peter Pan, she couldn’t help but be oddly grateful. “Brilliant,” she stated instead, narrating her thoughts out loud. “It must be rather lonely to be a mischievous boy. People are not always fond of pranksters, but at least you two have each other.”
Their smiles blossomed at that, and Hermione couldn’t help but smile back.
“What are you doing here?” the boy named George eventually asked.
“I am off to find an adventure.”
The boy’s eyes gleamed as they considered that. “What sort of adventure?”
She shrugged around an awkward grin. “I’m not sure yet. I imagine I will know when I find it.” She had a strong feeling these two were a part of it somehow, and couldn’t help but articulate that feeling, somehow knowing these boys would appreciate adventures. “Would you two like to help me? Shall we explore, or perhaps play a game?”
Their grins grew as they looked first at each other, and then at her. “Let’s go to the hideout!” they announced together, and Hermione could not help but be caught up in their enthusiasm.
“Let’s!” she announced with excitement, and then the children took off together through the woods, laughing as they gleefully chased each other around trees and bushes.
The hideout turned out to be exactly what she might have expected from the Lost Boys. Put together in a bit of a slapdash manner, an extremely large tree (Hermione is quite sure she had never seen one so large) was hollowed out to create an opening that led to a large burrow of sorts underneath the trunk and surrounded by roots. There was also a kind of tree house stationed on top of the many branches that looked as if it would fall, but both boys assured her that it was reinforced with so many charms that, “This little shack will be here forever.”
Hermione was normally completely incapable of getting along with her peers. The many playdates her parents had arranged with their professional acquaintances had all ended in disaster, as Hermione did not have the patience to create nonsense games with small toys, and they did not have any interest in reading stories as a group activity. Likewise, her experiences at school had demonstrated that her inclination towards reading and her desire for praise made her very few friends. Somehow, with these boys, sharing was so easy. They did not at all mind as she recounted her favorite adventure novels, as she enlisted their aid in helping her determine what kind of adventure she was destined to have. And they in turn introduced her to brilliant, wonderful, magical things that she could never have dreamed of seeing. Frogs made of chocolate that hopped around the small space, magazines filled with pictures that actually moved, and a game called Exploding Snap, which was a card game that created literal explosions.
Hermione’s mouth was sore from giggling nonstop since they arrived.
One of the boys eventually asked about her soft toy, and Hermione proudly presented him. “This is Falkor! He is a luck dragon. He helps those who are having a difficult time and have lost faith.” Smiling sadly, she softly added, “He has a good will and an open heart, and heavily relies on his friends to keep him company and protect him against bad things.”
She snuggled him carefully into her chest, mentally acknowledging for the umpteenth time that it was her responsibility to make sure he was never alone. It was one she took very seriously.
One of the boys, George she was sure, inched forward on his knees and shook the dragon’s tiny paw. “How do you do Falkor? It’s a pleasure.”
His twin came around and held the other paw, his face somehow more exaggerated than his twin’s as he did his best to sniff in disdain like an adult. “Indeed, indeed. A pleasure to meet such a distinguished gentleman.”
Hermione giggled. “The pleasure is his, surely, to come across such lovely boys.”
Fred pretended to be shocked, placing his hand dramatically on his chest as he proclaimed, “Lovely! Georgie, she called us lovely!”
George did his best to look affronted. “The gall! I’ll have you know that we are roguish!”
“Rascals!”
“Hooligans!”
“Miscreants!”
“Ruffians!”
“Positively Dastardly?” Hermione interrupted in amusement.
Both boys grinned. “Exactly!” they proclaimed together. “Hardly lovely.”
Hermione shrugged. “Still wonderful,” she asserted firmly.
And both boys couldn’t seem to help themselves as they launched their bodies at her in pretend outrage. Squirming underneath the pile, Hermione laughed as they all play-wrestled atop the woven rug, unafraid to push and tickle when necessary in order to dominate the small boys. They fought valiantly, however, eventually teaming up to administer tickles of their own. All of the children eventually exhausted themselves, and spread out of the floor, still in a tangle, they took deep breaths and stared at the tree roots that made up the ceiling of the hide-out.
“This is so nice,” Hermione eventually admitted into the air above them. “People don’t normally like me.”
Fred gave her a disgruntled look. “Why? You seem perfectly nice to me?”
She sighed. “I’m not quite sure. They somehow think I’m boring, but I also think they’re boring. How does that work exactly?”
George shrugged, his shoulders shifting underneath her with the movement. “Most people are boring. But you won’t be to the people that matter.”
The girl couldn’t help the small, hesitant smile as she considered that. “People that matter. Does this mean you both want to be my friends?”
She could somehow feel both twins roll their eyes simultaneously, and giggled.
“We don’t let just anyone in our hide-out,” one of them, the one sprawled out on top of her stomach (Fred she was sure), stated like it should be obvious.
“I see,” she grinned into the room that was rapidly losing light.
George eventually shuffled to his feet, and held out a hand to help her stand up. “It’s getting a bit dimpsey. Where do you live?”
Her expression faltered as she considered this. Her literary adventures had all necessitated a change in location, which meant she couldn’t go back… but these boys likely had a family that wasn’t going to accept a stranger into their home just like that. “Not far,” she stated as casually as she could, doing her best not to show her inner panic.
It was dark enough in the room that both boys seemed to have missed any sign of her anxiety. “Brilliant! You should come back soon so we can play together again!”
Fred nodded at his twin. “You could help us plot out our next prank!”
“Perhaps,” she smiled at them widely. “I will try. But it will depend on where my adventure takes me.”
Fred shrugged. “Make it take you here.”
Hermione sighed, unsure about how to adequately explain that such adventures usually happened outside of the protagonist’s control. Plot was very much like destiny, and she was a victim to fate’s whims. “I will do my best,” she eventually settled on, and both boys grinned as they led her to the boundary of their property. She said her goodbyes a bit desperately, hugging both boys tightly, and then she scurried away before she could do something else incriminating.
It was scary. Wandering in the dark. What started out as bright, cheery trees and sunny pastures turned into dark paths lined with moving shadows that somehow chilled the very air. In her fearful determination and building anxiety she pressed on, hoping to find a small idyllic cottage quick unlike the one shared by her relatives.
Instead she was found wandering by a concerned adult, who felt it necessary to alert certain authorities. And in no time at all she was being led up to the steps that stood in front of her Uncle’s cottage.
Her reintroduction to the household was extremely painful. The older man beat on her until she could barely whimper in pain, and they locked her in the storage closet with a bucket so she would no longer need to be let out to use the restroom. Hermione cried once again as she laid out on the small cot, clutching Falkor to her chest. But the memories she had formed earlier that day of two perfectly lovely boys gave her a source of strength and determination. She would see them again, she just knew it.