CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT:
There was something distinctly wild and fey-like about Hermione Granger that didn't even come close to fitting in with the posh London home she lived in with her parents. When Minerva had knocked on the door of the muggleborn witch's home, she'd been startled by the sight of the girl who greeted her– with bright eyes, wild curls woven through with flowers and a long, pretty dress that wouldn't look out of place in Diagon Alley, Minerva had immediately and instinctively known there was something different about Hermione Granger.
She was a fascinating child; her British accent lilted and curled in ways that Minerva couldn't quite identity, she moved in a way unlike any child the woman had seen, with an unusual fluidity that presented her as a creature of extreme, holding herself as predator and prey, ready to both pounce to attack and dive to dodge, and she wore what looked like predator-animal teeth for earrings, and bracelets with Ancient Runes, some that Minerva recognised from her days of taking the class, and some she didn't. And then there was her casual display of magic... Minerva had never seen any eleven-year-old child control their magic the way Hermione Granger had.
Hermione Granger's parents were far more typical in their personalities and reactions. There tended to be two categories that the parents of muggleborns fell into— there were those who were thrilled by the idea of magic and thought their children special and extraordinary for their magical talents, and there were those who were afraid and uneasy and very opposed to their children studying wizardry and witchcraft. Religious families in particular were problematic when it came to accepting that magic wasn't associated with demons and the devil.
Both obviously well off and well educated, Richard and Helen Granger fell into the second category of being very unhappy about their daughter's magic. If they could have refused to send her to Hogwarts, they would have in a heartbeat— and Minerva hadn't missed their fearful reaction to seeing Miss Granger's magic in action. Nor had she missed the young girl's resignation to the fear, as though she'd been expecting it, had prepared herself for it, even.
Minerva's heart hurt for the child, and she regretted that it would be a year before the young muggleborn witch would start her attendance of Hogwarts. The poor girl would do better surrounded by her peers and challenged with the thrill of learning magic then she would spending her time with parents who were afraid of her and her extraordinary gifts. She quite intended on owling Miss Granger the resources she'd requested about their society— resources which she'd already decided to bring along with her to the next muggleborn she was tasked with introducing to the magical world, as well as perhaps the muggleborns of the current school year because Miss Granger was quite correct that familiarity with magical laws and society would serve well in the transition from the muggle to magical world— but perhaps she would include a note inviting the young witch to write to her with any questions she had from the material, encouraging a discourse between them. Her ability to support Miss Granger before she started attending Hogwarts was limited, but she could do this much for the girl.
She really was quite charmed by Hermione Granger, and while she hoped the young witch would end up in her House, she rather suspected she had a future Ravenclaw on her hands— at least Filius would truly be delighted by her.
::
Gabriel noticed immediately how quiet Hermione was when he returned to visit her, later on the afternoon of her birthday, after her Hogwarts letter had been delivered. She was curled up on her bed in a nest of blankets with Vashti curled up with her, reading softly aloud to the young phoenix from one of the new books she'd received. Where her soul had been bright and fluttering with excitement this morning, it was now dim and still and her smile when she looked up and noticed him was weak.
"Oh honey," he said, sitting down beside her on the bed and rubbing Vashti's golden beak with his thumb before gently tugging on one of her curls, "what happened?"
"Hele-mum and dad didn't take it well," Hermione admitted quietly, looking as mournful and helplessly, hopelessly resigned as a kitten who'd been dropped into a tub of water for a bath. "We... talked, after Professor McGonagall, the representative from Hogwarts, left. They don't want me to go, and I had to tell them I already planned on condensing my final two years of high school into one year to get mum to stop getting all teary and dad going on and on about the lost opportunities. Then they started talking about me accelerating through my years at Hogwarts too, so I could finish it as soon as possible and return to the 'normal' world and start university."
Gabriel had to close his eyes briefly as his grace burned with his rage and he fought the urge to enact a series of nasty just desserts on Richard and Helen Granger. But he knew Hermione wouldn't want that, so he restrained himself and instead of focusing on what he couldn't change, he focused on what he could— cheering Hermione up.
"Come on," he announced, holding out his hand to her as Vashti perked up, fluffing her feathers and chirruping excitedly, "it's still your birthday— let's go do something fun!"
Hermione actually managed a smile at that, pushing away the blankets she'd made into a nest and sitting up, reaching to accept to his hand. "Thank you, Loki," she said softly, fervently, reverently. "I don't know what I ever did to deserve you in my life, but thank you."
Gabriel looked down at her, down at that beautiful, brilliant, bright, devoted soul, and told her, "I take care of those that I consider worthy of the dedication, and you, Hermione, are more than worthy."
Hermione smiled cheekily then, and he couldn't help but be delighted by the spark of mischief that returned to her eyes. "Does that mean I'd be able to lift Thor's hammer, then?"
"Urgh," Gabriel couldn't help but roll his eyes and grimace. "If it took worthiness to lift Mjölnir, that oaf Thor would never have been able to get it off the ground."
He'd have to ask his sons and Eris what they'd done with Mjölnir after killing Thor— the enchanted warhammer was a powerful weapon, one that was capable of killing pagan gods and therefore not something he really wanted left lying around for any old schmuck to find. His Father only knew what the other pagan gods, demons and demon-witches alike would be willing to pay or trade for it.
"I love learning which myths are real, which aren't, and those that are in between," Hermione said, her eyes having lit up with interest, before she pulled a slight face and grumbled, "even if I was planning on going to a muggle university, not pursuing magical studies, I'd much sooner study myth, legend and history then medicine."
"Well you'd certainly have a unique advantage there," Gabriel said encouragingly, with a bright smile, "though it would be difficult to provide the evidence to back up your claims. But enough of the boring serious talk, it's time for birthday fun!"
And with a snap, the three of them disappeared from London and appeared on the grounds of an American carnival, a simple nudge of perception hiding Vashti from the ordinary humans around them, where Hermione passive-aggressively ate her way through the stalls of carnival food her dentist parents would never have approved of in a million years, before he dragged her and Vashti onto every single ride.
After all the junk she'd eaten, Hermione threw up twice while on the rides, once actually on him, which had startled them both so much when it happened that they both stood there for nearly ten seconds just staring at the partially-digested candy-corn, funnel cake and fairy-floss splashed over his pants and shoes before he remembered he could vanish it.
Hermione was mortified, despite his amusement over the whole thing, and swore she'd make it up to him by winning the most ridiculous oversized, overstuffed prize she could. She managed it too, and the fact she used her magic to cheat and make sure the blunt, improperly balanced darts managed to pop every single one of the half-inflated balloons instead of bouncing off them just made him prouder and he carried around the bright sunshine-yellow and extremely fluffy teddy-bear nearly as big as Hermione that was handed over sourly to him by the stall owner with pride.
He knew her good spirits wouldn't last, not when she and her parents were going to have to work through her parents' new knowledge of her magic, but when Gabriel tucked Hermione into bed that night her soul was once again bright as the sun.
::
Helen and Richard lasted two and a half weeks– which was two weeks longer then Hermione had honestly been expecting, as she'd admitted to Dr. Mia in the thrice-weekly appointments she'd been having with her therapist since Professor McGonagall's visit.
Hermione honestly preferred staying with her Aunt Iona and Uncle Arran over her parents, but that didn't mean it didn't hurt when they'd rejected her, preferring to send her far away, out of sight and mind, then to have her at home.
Officially, they claimed it was that her choice to be homeschooled (self-directed learning would make it easier to accelerate her studies to finish her final two years of schooling in just one year) meant that she'd be left alone and unsupervised for far too many hours if she stayed with them in London, as they both worked full-time, whereas Iona MacLeod was already homeschooling three of her children, and one extra wouldn't be an issue. There was an element of truth to what they were saying, Hermione acknowledged, but she also knew that her parents could have just hired an au pair or a nanny to supervise her. They already had a gardener and a housekeeper, after all– it wasn't that they were opposed to domestic assistants, or that they couldn't afford one. They just... didn't want her around.
Hermione wondered if the distance between her and her parents could ever be fixed, if she took the time to put in the effort. Part of her rebelled against the idea that she should have to put in any effort at all; it raged that her parents' love for her should be unconditional, and that anything else was unforgivable. The wiser part of her, however, understood that her parents alone weren't to blame for the strain in their relationship. She'd distanced herself from them too– too angry at them, for not believing her about Ness being in danger, for not realising how dangerously depressed Ness was and getting her help, for not stopping Ness from dying. She'd been too angry to be rational, to truly understand that they'd had about as little idea of how much Ness was truly suffering inside as she'd had and had needed a target for her rage– if it was someone else's fault, after all, then it couldn't be her fault for not noticing, for not seeing, for not helping Ness.
And maybe her parents, as the adults, should have known better, maybe they should have done something about the deteriorating relationship between the three of them before it had ended up the way it was now, but they hadn't. They hadn't, because Hermione may have lost a sister, but they'd lost their child too and they'd been trying to deal with that, and deal with the wreck that their remaining daughter had become in the aftermath.
It didn't take long after the decision had been made (or at least verbally acknowledged; Hermione suspected the three of them had all known what the decision would be from the day of Professor McGonagall's visit, when her parents had flinched away from her magical display) for the details to be sorted between her parents and her aunt and uncle. It was a tense time in the Granger household, and Hermione was grateful for Hati's lessons in knife-throwing that let her vent out her frustration and anger in a way that wasn't too destructive. Loki even took her on the second of the three promised Not-Hunts, where together they faced off against a colony of malicious Redcaps in Berwickshire, Scotland.
The Redcaps had apparently been banished from Avalon, the Faery Realm, and were now responsible for the deaths of three human children. A Named fey, one of the Tuath Dé, had asked for Loki to deal with the Redcaps as a favour to them, her god had explained to her, and having one of the fey indebted to you was always a good thing. Hermione was fascinated by the idea of the entire separate realm which the fey existed in, which led to Loki's casual, mind-blowing revelation that Avalon wasn't the only realm that existed within the cracks and empty spaces of the universe, but she managed to focus her attention on the problem of the Redcaps first and was able to track them down to the ruins of an old fort, now barely more than rubble, that bordered the town where the children had gone missing.
The Redcaps were foul beings; short and thickset with long teeth that were eerily sharp and white, long, skinny fingers topped with talons like raptors, large red eyes like pools of blood and pointed ears that stuck out through grisly, knotted hair matted with the blood that leaked steadily from their wet, soaked crimson caps. Hermione actually felt nauseous when she realised that the blood their caps were soaked in likely belonged to the missing children— and then she felt pissed.
The Redcaps fought like miniature berserkers, bellowing and shrieking in a language entirely foreign to her, and Hermione got to put her new knife-throwing skills to the test (which was actually probably one of the reasons why Loki chose to bring her along for the Not-Hunt) by aiming her stiletto blades at the blood-soaked red caps to knock them from the heads of the Redcaps so Vashti could swoop down and burn the caps to cinders. This effectively stripped the Redcaps of their powers, leaving them to scream and whither and shrink in place, until only small gnarly and sickly-looking trees remained where they'd been standing. Vashti had then very decisively set fire to the twisted, stunted trees, reducing them to little more than ash.
After catching a glimpse of the remains of the missing children before Loki had noticed, sworn violently and transported her back to London with a snap of his fingers, Hermione felt it was a very deserving fate— though it had lacked a trickster's delicious irony, she was still satisfied that the Redcaps had received their just desserts.
Something else that had helped pass the tense time between Professor McGonagall's visit and the planned date of her departure were the letters she'd received— and they'd been delivered via actual owls too! She'd known that was how witches and wizards delivered their mail, of course, but it was one thing to read about the owl postal system, and quite another to actually experience it!
Professor McGonagall had sent her the promised materials about magical Great Britain's laws and culture, as well as a note inviting her to write back with any questions she had (and Hermione was not the sort of person to turn down an invitation for knowledge!), and the part-Veela witch she'd met in France had actually written to her too! Fleur had badly concealed how upset she was in the first letter as she mentioned how 'tiresomely' the school year had started, as the two bullies from the bookstore, Prunella Perreault and Faustine Roux, hadn't taken the humiliation of the encounter well.
You would think I'd have a thicker skin by now, but alas, even if I make certain not to show it, I still bruise easily, Fleur had written, which honestly made Hermione's heart hurt. Fleur's following letter detailing the aftermath of the pranking ideas and spells Hermione had sent back had been much more cheerful, with the French witch expounding in great detail the glee she'd experienced watching live anchovies squirm out of a shrieking Perreault's nose, and how Roux had spent nearly an hour trying to find the counter-curse for the glue in her hair, not realising it wasn't a curse at all but a pot of muggle glue that Hermione had sent back with Fleur's owl along with her letter, and the prejudiced witch had ended up managing to accidentally vanish her own hair!
After a moment of contemplation, Hermione decided to glue Fleur's letters in the scrapbook she'd made of the Just Desserts that Loki had delivered unto Ness's bullies. She also added copies of the articles about the Mongolian Death Worm victims, the now 'missing' scientist and the articles about the Redcap victims. It wasn't a precisely happy scrapbook, but it made her feel better to look at it and know that there was justice in the world, even if that justice was unconventional.
It took around a month after Professor McGonagall's visit for everything to finally be sorted, by which time Hermione had already started her lessons by correspondence, and the date of her return to Fraserburgh had arrived. It was while Hermione was packing, however, that she came across a problem she previously hadn't considered.
There wasn't exactly a lot of extra space available in her aunt and uncle's house, and she would once again be sharing a bedroom with three other people. There would barely be enough room for her trunk of clothes and the books she'd need for her schoolwork, let alone all her other books, Vashti's perch (Loki had already promised to disguise Vashti as a canary, so she didn't have to leave her behind), her two altars and the Rosetta Stone, amongst the various other odds and ends she'd collected during her travels with Loki, and she didn't want to leave it all in London, as she didn't want to have to visit her parents' house, even if it was without their knowledge, every time she wished to access them.
It was Loki who came up with the solution, in the end. "I've got a spare room," he told her cheerfully, "whatever you can't bring with you, you can keep there."
Despite how casually he'd declared it, Hermione had been quietly stunned. For all the travelling they'd done, around the globe and through time both, Loki had never taken her to one of his houses before.
His 'beach house', as he called the property (though calling it a 'house' was very misleading) he took her to, was... actually, if she was being honest, it was exactly what she'd come to expect from her god. Its walls gleamed brightly in the sunshine like a jewel, palm trees and vibrant gardens grew lush and colourful on the property's grounds, a majestic pool of polished stone she suspected to be marble shimmered pearly-white and sapphire-blue amidst the greenery, and she only had to step out the back door to be ankle-deep in the golden sand of a private beach that bordered the ocean.
The inside of the house was just as magnificent; just stepping inside the foyer, the floor was a brilliant white marble, the magnificent chandelier was a dazzling gold and everything just about glittered and screamed of wealth and hedonism. "What?" Loki grinned, seeing the faintly incredulous look she turned his way after taking a moment to absorb her surroundings, "I'm a pagan god, sugar. Hedonism is our jam."
"Yes, but there's hedonism," Hermione told him, before gesturing around them, "and then there's this!"
"I can't help it if I'm the best at everything, hedonism included," Loki told her smugly.
"You are unbelievable," she told him, and he smirked.
"And yet, you're my little believer."
She couldn't really argue with the truth of that, but still– "Your puns are the absolute worst," she informed him, not that that meant anything when he just took it as a compliment, the gigantic dork.
The bedroom of his 'beach house' he'd offered for her to store her things in was as amazing as the rest of the house. It had a 'summer sky' sort of theme going, with the walls painted to resemble fluffy white clouds on a pale-blue summer's day, twinkling lights and an enormous bed covered by a puffy white duvet and equally puffy white pillows, which made it resemble a large, fluffy cloud.
Loki created her several bookshelves with a snap of his fingers for her to unpack the many, many books she sadly couldn't bring with her that she'd collected over the years, as well as stands for her to place her altars and the Rosetta Stone on to be displayed and a large chest for her various odds and ends. She did bring her altar stones with her, though, as well as the first candle she'd ever used to pray to Loki, the one with the wax that had never melted, and her athame from Morgana– just because she wouldn't have a proper altar to pray at, it didn't mean she wouldn't still be giving her proper thanks and prayers to her beloved god and his beloved family.
She half-wished she could stay the night there, and try out the outrageously soft and fluffy-looking cloud-like bed, but it would be her last night staying with her parents for a good long while, and despite the seemingly insurmountable distance between the three of them, she did feel an obligation and reluctantly turned Loki down when he offered.
There was a great deal of understanding on her god's face as he muttered, "family," with a sigh and a shake of his head. She supposed that Loki, 'blood-brother' of Odin, according to the mythology that she hadn't asked about as she didn't wish to upset her god, would understand the trials and tribulations of family, even more so then she did.
::
And then, finally, the day had arrived, a day Hermione thought she'd been waiting for ever since she'd been forced to leave Fraserburgh.
Unlike last time, when Uncle Arran had been the one to pick her up from Peterhead, the town closest to Fraserburgh, after she caught a plane, a train and then two buses, this time Aunt Iona, Uncle Arran, Angus and Leana, her two youngest cousins, were all waiting for her. Hermione didn't hesitate to throw herself into her aunt's strong arms, closing her eyes to stop the tears as Iona hugged her fiercely. Uncle Arran ruffled her hair fondly, chuckling slightly as he nudged one of the little golden bells, and once Iona had released her, both Leana and Angus tackled her in great, big hugs of their own.
Her last drive from Peterhead to Fraserburgh had passed in near silence, just her and Uncle Arran in the car, but this time it was filled with happy chatter. Both Leana and Angus were delighted by her 'pet canary', tame enough to sit on her shoulder and not fly away, and Vashti, though mildly disgruntled by the disguise, was still preening under their awe and trilling out sweet little songs. The three of them chatted excitedly in the backseat, Leana and Angus filling her in on what she'd missed.
When the car pulled up beside the familiar small but spotless house, Hermione could feel the tears in her eyes again and Aunt Iona turned in the front seat of the car to give her a warm smile. "Welcome home, Hermione," she said.
And Hermione beamed.