Dramione (non-)drabble prompt: Demeter
So, yeah, this went well past the 500-word limit I was using for the others. And I guess I probably could've been strict with myself and written a different version of it that stuck to the limit, but I enjoyed this prompt a bit too much to want to do that. I figured that since I'm not actually writing for the LDWS event, there's no real restriction on me, so I've gone gung-ho and written freely for this one.
Again, @simplifiedemotions is my darling and my dream for betaing.
Helen Granger has lived an astoundingly ordinary life for the last thirty-eight years. Check off the boxes: a charmingly average childhood, an unassuming little dental practice in outer London, a two-up/two-down on a quiet street, and a lovely if sometimes slightly vague husband.
Totally ordinary, by all accounts.
The only thing she considers truly extraordinary about her life is her daughter, but then don’t all parents believe that about their children?
And if, over the years, Hermione has done a few things that have made Helen tilt her head — found ways into places no developmentally-normal three-year-old should be able to access, or reported a little too much kinship with Matilda Wormwood and her telekinetic powers — then… Well, just because one is unable to explain something doesn’t mean it’s inexplicable in the absolute. And normal is a spectrum, after all.
But the woman sitting in Helen’s living room right now…
She isn’t normal in the slightest.
When Hermione was eight, she started ballet classes. Helen took her to see Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House, and Hermione spent the next month pirouetting around the living room, transforming from maiden to swan and back again.
When Hermione studied Ancient Greece in Year Five, Helen assumed it would be Athena who caught her eye. But no. She came home from school full of questions about Persephone, bound to split her time between over- and underworlds.
“Why did she eat the pomegranate seeds if she knew she’d be trapped?”
Hermione’s forehead creased in thought too thorough, too careful for a ten-year-old.
“Maybe she wanted to stay, but she knew her mum wouldn’t understand. So she chose to eat them. I think she wanted part of her life to be there."
During a family holiday to Portugal last summer, Helen and Hermione worked their way through the entire His Dark Materials trilogy together, squished up on a sunbed by the pool.
When they reached the parts about Lyra crossing a bridge in the sky, about Will stepping through a window in the air to find another world beyond, Hermione prodded her to read faster, desperate to turn the page and see what these strange new places might hold.
It’s a process, understanding that her daughter exists between two different lives now.
“She’s just gone off to boarding school,” Rob says. He always has been better at taking things in stride than her. “She’ll be back for the holidays, just the same.”
Every time Hermione comes home, term after term, she seems a little more torn, a little more stretched between the life she was born into and the one that she has to fight to be a part of — this world full of culture that Hermione didn’t grow up knowing, full of people who didn’t think to introduce her into their ranks with any real degree of empathy or provision for her lack of familiarity.
Full of shitty little rich boys with blond hair who call her names and tell her she doesn’t belong.
On the surface, most of the stories she brings back are glorious, all wonder and excitement, but Helen knows there’s more to it than that. She can sense the blank spots in Hermione’s tales where she’s letting details slip through the gaps, and with each one that passes, Helen feels like she recognises her daughter a little less.
How is she meant to understand someone who lives their life so divided, spinning out of reach through a world that she can’t touch?
Hermione’s sixteen now, and bad things are happening on the other side. She doesn’t say it quite so plainly, but Helen can read between the lines on this one, and…
And she can’t take it anymore.
“You’ll be in danger if you go back there, won’t you? Tell me the truth, Hermione, please!”
“I’m fine, Mum. Hogwarts is safe. And Harry needs me to—”
“What could that boy possibly need from you that’s so important?” Another silence that Helen knows is born from her daughter holding something back. She breathes deep and lowers her voice, gentler now. More reasoning. “If you just stayed here, if you didn’t go back to school for now, maybe you’d be—”
“Mum!” Hermione blanches. “I have to go back! I belong there.”
“Yes, I do, here too, of course, but I can’t just leave Hogwarts. I can’t ignore that part of my life.”
“Well, you ignore this part!”
Hermione recoils like she’s been slapped, face crumpling. For a moment they’re both frozen, as if someone’s immortalised the moment on some awful red-figure amphora — a moment of tragedy to rival the best the Greeks had to offer.
Then time starts up again, and the barest of movements is enough to send everything crashing to the ground.
“It’s okay. You didn’t mean it. I know. It’s… It’s okay.”
It’s not okay, though. They’ve shattered, too thoroughly to fix before Hermione departs for school the next day.
Through the term, her letters are stiff and succinct.
Christmas is a quiet affair.
And when she comes home for the summer, everything feels…wrong.
The Sydney sun is warm on Monica Wilkins’ face, and she can’t help smiling. This was a good move; things feel simpler here than they did back in England.
A year, a hidden war, and half a rewritten lifetime all pass by in a blink.
Her mind belongs to Monica, but, more and more, her heart is making its way back to being Helen’s.
She relearns her daughter through fresh eyes that have discovered how to see a life from two sides, and though she has no memory of how things were before, she has the feeling that it’s all a bit clearer now. She understands more, she thinks.
Because she’s Monica, and she’s Hermione’s mother, and the two don’t overlap. Not really. But that doesn’t mean that either feels any less true.
Christmastime rolls around again, the first they’ll be spending as a family since… Actually, the first ever, as far as Monica can remember.
They lead strange existences, all of them — fragmented but somehow not lacking in fullness for it. Less broken, more mosaic, made up of different pieces that never really touch but still form a whole, colourful, sometimes challenging, always beautiful picture.
They’re building it up, bit by bit, visit by visit.
And this time, Hermione brings a new piece to add to the image. There’s a man with her now, tall and pale and black-clad. Blond. A little sharp-featured, if Monica’s judging.
He seems uncomfortable, this Draco fellow. Nervous, perhaps? She can’t blame him; theirs is an odd family dynamic to come into, no doubt, and she can tell from the way Hermione explains the contents of their kitchen to him that he’s been a one-world man up until now.
But he’s trying — it’s clear in the way he endures Wendell’s well-worn lecture on the politics of the Australian Football League. God knows no one could sit through that for any other reason.
“The two of you are happy, aren’t you?” Hermione asks during a quiet moment, after presents and before dinner. Her face is scrunched up in a way that Monica understands without recognising. “I didn’t completely ruin your lives by sending you here, did I?”
“Oh, honey.” Their hands find each other. “Of course you didn’t. Look at us — we’re very happy.” A squeeze of her fingers. “Are you?”
Hermione doesn’t answer for a moment, her eyes soft on Draco where he sits across the room.
“I wasn’t expecting him,” she murmurs at length. “I mean, I had to figure out how to live between the two worlds, but he was so deep in his that for a long time it seemed like we’d never be able to understand each other.”
“So many things. He reached out, and we met in the shallows. Both chose to eat the pomegranate seeds.” A laugh springs out of her, just unchecked enough that Monica might call it giddy, and her face shines wheat field gold. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.”
At the raise of her voice, the subject of their conversation looks over towards them. He’s bearing the expression of a man expertly harangued, but Monica’s motherly eye has been growing back in rather well over the last few months, and she doesn’t miss how things shift as he catches sight of Hermione’s smile: the flicker of a blink, like maybe he’s still a little stunned by her; the creasing of his eyes and the twitch at the corner of his mouth as he shakes his head in her direction before turning back towards Wendell.
A good man, Monica thinks. Awkward, taciturn, but good. Someone who’ll be there for Hermione when she’s off in that strange other space she inhabits. Letting her go is easier this time around than Monica imagines it’s ever been; once dinner’s been and gone, she waves the two of them away, just as any mother would, and it feels quite marvellously everyday.
Of course, her daughter is truly extraordinary, but then don’t all parents believe that about their children?
She closes the door with a smile and makes her way down the hallway towards the kitchen. Maybe, if she’s lucky, Wendell will have already set the kettle boiling.
