A/N: Okay, let me just say right off the bat that this is going to very loosely follow the events in canon, if at all. This is a lighter, fix-it type of story, because what's the point of writing a fanfiction without trying your hand at changing something?
As the title might imply, Hermione will be the star of the show. While some of the misadventures Harry embarks on will happen, they'll either be off-screen or altered from canon. The point of this series is to create new adventures for Hermione and see how they affect the canon plot.
This first book will be much shorter than the others—a prequel story, if you will—because it will be about her life before Hogwarts, and really, it's not that fun without all her friends there to add some excitement.
Also, as of writing this author's note, I haven't solidified any pairings. I've planned out the seven years in just under twenty pages of notes, but this is for fanfiction, and planning beyond the major plot points is cumbersome and timely. Since I also write for money, I won't spend that much time figuring out every detail beforehand. The focus is on experiencing the adventures with friends, and if she experiences crushes and dates along the way, then so be it. Part of the adventure is not knowing who her end game is. Just be advised that I have a proclivity for Hermione/Multi. pairings or reverse-harem pairings.
Lastly, without revealing too much of the plot, she descends from two powerful lines and will have two rare abilities because of it. If over-powered Hermione is not your kick, you might want to keep scrolling.She'll save lives, she'll lose some, some things might echo of major events she experienced in the book series, but nothing so repetitive that you're just reading a copy and paste of Rowling's stories.
So, after that quite wordy author's note, let me step back and let you enjoy the show.
Chapter 1 – October 28, 1985
Hermione sighed, seeing her breath in the air.
She sat up, squinting in the dark of her room. It'd been so long since her last episode that her parents' smiles had grown genuine throughout the last week instead of forced. They'd even taken some time off from their practice to spend time with her this summer.
"Ignore it, Hermione," she whispered to herself. "Just ignore it. There's nothing cowardly about ignoring something already dead, especially when it messes up your life."
A blast of cold sliced through the room before leveling out once more.
Despite her words, she couldn't ignore the presence behind her. Resigned, she squeezed her eyes shut before reopening them. An ethereal blue light tinted everything, the brightest point of which originated from behind her.
Already knowing what she'd see if she turned, she faced the apparition.
It was a small girl around her age, maybe a year older, and she instinctively knew that fact would make her life that much more difficult when empathy sprung up with a fierce vengeance.
If she was a recently deceased six-year-old girl, wouldn't she want someone to notify her parents about where her body was located? Especially if, as were most of the ghosts that visited her, a violent death was involved?
Put in perspective like that, she gathered up her considerable maturity for her young age and cast aside her worries. This girl had recently died, and she was worried about her parents not wanting to take time off work to spend the day at the zoo with her.
"Hello," Hermione whispered, keeping her voice low to not disturb her parents. The zoo was her favorite place after all, second only to the local library. There was no point in dragging them into matters if this ghost's issue was something that could be resolved on her own. "My name's Hermione. What's your name?"
Why was it so much easier to talk to the dead than it was conversing with her peers at school?
"T-T-T-Theresa."
Her voice came out in the multi-layered way of departed souls, sounding like three speakers superimposed atop of each other but with an echoing lag. It made it that much more difficult to decipher the breathy words. "Theresa? That's good. What's your last name, Theresa?"
"Theresa."
Hermione resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose, a habit she'd picked up from her mom anytime Dad recited one of his Dad jokes. "Yes, but your last name, Theresa. Mine's Granger. Hermione Granger. What is your last name?"
"I don't want the bad man to hurt me anymore."
Hackles rose up and down Hermione's arms. "The bad man?"
The little girl nodded, her eyes bugged but her expression solemn. "With the knife."
Hermione blinked. Even though the coldest part of these experiences happened at actual manifestation when they seemingly needed a burst of energy to break through whatever veil hid them from the living, her body broke out in goosebumps. "A k-knife?"
"Yes. It's really sharp. H-He cut me with it, right here." The girl pointed to her tummy.
Hermione's eyes filled with tears. She'd expected a car accident, not a... "Oh, that's just awful! You poor thing! I'll help you. I promise!"
Theresa's form shimmered, flickering in and out in the face of Hermione's vehemence.
"No! Don't! Please don't disappear. I won't be able to help find you. You want me to find you, don't you?"
The little girl trembled in place, her bottom lip pushing out as her eyelids shivered. If she were alive, Hermione imagined she'd be crying by now. As it was, she would never shed a tear again.
Even at the tender age of six, Hermione knew it was time for a new tact. She climbed out of bed, slotted her feet into her perfectly placed slippers, and beckoned the ghost to follow her to her desk. "Come here, Theresa. Would you like to watch while I draw a picture?"
Art wasn't one of her top subjects at school, but she put in more effort into that than PE, utilizing her practice with crayons to improve her penmanship.
"Okay," Theresa whispered in that layered, multi-voice output of the dead.
"I'm not very good," Hermione admitted, squinting at the wobbly triangle floating over a squiggly banana shape. "It's supposed to be a boat. You know, like a sailboat. My parents took me one time to the event in Teddington Lock where they... What's wrong, Theresa?"
"I like to draw."
"Oh," Hermione wanted to offer her a new sheet of paper, but unless she was a lot stronger than all the other apparitions that'd visited throughout the years, she wouldn't be able to interact with the crayons. "What would you draw? Maybe I can try to draw it for you."
Theresa glanced at her, not seeming to find it strange that Hermione hadn't shared in that way that some ghosts were wont to do, especially ones living in denial. "Oh, I think I would draw," she bit her lip, narrowing her eyes in concentration. "I think I would draw a bird."
Hermione swapped the blue for a black and sketched out a pigeon which ended up looking more like a demented bat trying to tango. She tried not to sigh at her limitations. If she'd been born with the gift of drawing, her life might've been so much easier. Ghosts often came to her incoherent, unable to give even the straightest of answer. If she'd been able to show her parents concrete proof, a visual to go along with, "The man with the bloodied hole in his head that dissolved from my room," then her life might've been a lot easier.
Ghosts didn't always look as pleasant and alive as Theresa did with her pristine periwinkle dress and black Mary Janes with folded over lace socks.
Theresa took a peek, hovering close enough over Hermione's shoulder that her next breath was visible in the cold air. Theresa giggled. "I'm sorry, but you're not very good at this, are you?"
"No," Hermione lamented.
"Well, let me help you out." And without further ado, Theresa's hand disappeared into Hermione's. She tried not to let her alarm show on her face, but she couldn't shake the disconcerting wrongness of an otherworldly presence controlling her hand.
It's okay, Hermione. Don't scare her off. She just died. You can stiff-upper lip through one drawing—her last drawing.
Pushing aside the alarm bells ringing in her head, she instead focused on watching the artwork unfold before her.
Despite being very good, Theresa was still a young girl, so it wasn't a masterpiece. Perhaps in time, with enough practice...
Hermione let the thought trail off and scoured the picture for any details. The s-shape of the bird with an elongated neck and sharp slash for a beak had to have been some sort of crane or herring. Blocks of bold colors took shape as Theresa added more detail and swapped out the crayons, even using a pencil to add in hash-marks for details. Hermione scarcely remembered that the ghost was using her hand to draw it any more.
"Is that a rainbow lake?"
Theresa giggled again, more comfortable now that she was in her element. "No, silly. They're buildings."
"Ah," Hermione intoned, adjusting her interpretation of the photo with the corrected information.
If the blocks were structures, likely small shops or single story cottages since they only seemed to have the hint of one row of windows, then the crane was gigantic, stretching up three times taller than anything else in the picture.
"What's this perpendicular line going through the middle?"
Theresa frowned. "Purple dip and dur?"
"No, perpen—" Hermione cut herself off from correcting her. There was a time and a place, she recited, something her teacher had repeated often. Precocious, but pretentious, her teacher had commented on the margins of her otherwise impeccable report. She'd had to lug out her two-volume dictionary, and then spent the evening dreading the inevitable, knowing full-well that she'd have to return the paper signed the next day.
Her teacher's words impacted harder than her peers' hurtful name calling of know-it-all Granger. The other kids didn't understand, but her teacher was a fellow academic.
And she knew it was true, thinking back on her past interactions with the violently departed.
The poor girl had bigger problems than learning new words. She used her unpossessed hand to point at the picture. "This line."
"Oh, that's the street."
Hermione analyzed the picture. If the street bisecting the drawing had a bunch of colorful stores, then maybe the box around the bird wasn't a box at all. Maybe it was...
"Oh!" Hermione gasped with realization, her voice so loud that the ghost disappeared in a blink. "Oh, no!"
"Hermione!" Her bedroom door pushed open so hard that it toppled the small overflow bookshelf her dad had been forced to install when her groaning three-tiered shelf refused to house a single book more. Her parents' concerned faces filled her doorway, though her dad's gaze shifted down to the rubble that remained of his DIY project.
"Bollocks," he sighed.
Her mom turned on him, scandalized. "Richard!"
"Sorry, Emma, it's just, I thought I hit the studs when I installed that thing." He nudged the displaced shelf with his stockinged foot. "But apparently I'm not as handy as I boasted if a measly hit from the door knocked it down."
"Richard, focus!"
"Quite right. Now, Hermione. What's all the hullabaloo about in here? We thought we heard you talking to someone."
The reminder kickstarted her memory. "Oh, Mum, Dad, it's awful!"
Her dad nodded sagely. "Was it the dream about the snakes again?"
Hermione blinked. "What? No, it was—"
Rolling with her denial, he pushed up his sleeves, as if preparing for battle. "The spiders?"
"No! I'm trying to tell you—"
Mr. Granger's eyes widened as he clutched the doorframe. "Oh, God save the queen! Don't tell me you've developed a fear of clowns. I can't help you with that. Clowns, Emma—"
"Richard Daniel Granger!" her mum shook her head and approached Hermione, glancing at the paper clutched tightly in her daughter's hands. "What's this?" Mrs. Granger's eyes rounded. "Oh. Oh my. This... this is very detailed, Hermione. Have you been practicing?"
Hermione's cheeks heated, as, interest piqued, Mr. Granger leaned over his wife's shoulder and let out a low whistle. "Tootsie pants, I didn't want to say anything but your other drawings, compared to this—"
Hermione rushed to cut him off. She was still recovering from the pretentious comment. If she had to listen to her dad detail how pants she was at drawing, she'd probably never recover any shred of self-confidence, especially when he tossed in that embarrassing nickname. It'd lost whatever remaining charm it held in her heart when he explained the story behind it. "No, no. I didn't draw it. Not really."
Her parents paused.
Realization set in with Mrs. Granger first as her eyes drew back down to the picture. "Oh, Hermione."
Those two words held a world of meaning, each of them burning into Hermione like a hot spike of shame. "I'm sorry, Mum, but it's true. A little girl—"
"Wait, this was a ghost? You're saying a ghost drew this?" her dad asked, swiping the paper from her mother's hands, not that it mattered. Her disappointed mum face hadn't left her, staring with unblinking focus.
As if she were figuring out how to fix her.
As if she were broken.
Tears welled in Hermione's eyes.
"How old was this ghost, by the by?" Her father grunted at the elbow to his ribs. "What, Emma?"
"Can we focus on the fact that our daughter is seeing ghosts? Hm? Do you think we could prioritize that at this unholy hour?"
"Er, yeah. Right. Hermione—"
"I'm sorry!" Hermione burst out, unable to hold back her tears. "I didn't want to disappoint you again, but she was my age, and I just thought I would want someone to help me if I were in her position. And—"
"Wait, you didn't disappoint us, tootsie pants," Richard interrupted. "You—wait, she...uh, Emma?"
Emma sighed, resigning herself to this rabbit hole. "I think we should move this conversation down to the kitchen for a cup of tea. I've a feeling it's going to be a long night."
"Oh, hot cocoa for me, dear!" her father called with excitement. "And maybe some of those digestives we picked up from the store last week. They were bloody delicious."
"Richard!"