Chapter Text
“You need to learn how to leave well enough alone,” someone had once told her.
She couldn’t even recall who it was, or what the context had been. Just that it was burned into her brain now, a warning as much as a benediction. Because for most of her life, Hermione Granger had a habit of meddling. She’d never quite figured out how to resist it, that urge to tug on a thread until it unspooled. Part of it was curiosity, yes; for she was insatiably curious, always asking why, why, why. But there was more to it than just that.
Hermione was, for better or worse, an observer first, and the world had never let her be otherwise. She watched. She catalogued.
She counted the seconds her elderly, widower neighbor, Mr. Chasten, stood at his mailbox, waiting for someone on their street to wave or say good morning. Some mornings only thirty, others, an unbearable minute or two.
She noticed the month where her mother went from radiantly happy to sobbing quietly over the sink when she thought Hermione wasn’t looking. She listened as her father tried to reassure her with words– ‘We’ll try again in a few months,’ or ‘Of course it’s nothing you did, love. Maybe we were just meant to have just one perfect little girl and that’s it.’
Later, she saw the way Harry watched Fred and George tease Ron the way older brothers do, with a longing so poignant even she had to look away.
She kept a running inventory of it all– people, moments, inconsistencies– until, inevitably, something inside her would reach capacity and she would have to “do.”
So one day she fell off her bike on purpose in front of Mr. Chasten’s house, when he just happened to be standing at the window. Knowing he’d come outside to check on her, and she’d ask him between sniffles to ring her mum and dad. Knowing that as a thank you for helping their daughter, her parents would likely invite the old man over for dinner, and he’d finally have people to talk to.
After that, her mum sent her over with baked goods at least once a week, and Mr. Chasten came round for dinner every Sunday until the day he passed.
Another day, Hermione went to the library. She checked out books on adoption and left them laying around the house until her parents sat her down and told her while they appreciated her thoughtfulness, they weren’t in a place to adopt a child right now, but maybe it was something to consider in the future. They didn’t talk about the baby her mum had lost, and Hermione thought perhaps that was something even she could not fix.
Then, one day during their second year, she could not take Harry’s loneliness anymore and cornered Dumbledore in his office. She simply insisted she be allowed to bring her friend home with her for the Christmas holidays. There were concerns about his safety, apparently, but the headmaster finally agreed that with some additional warding around her house and agreement from her parents and the Dursleys, he could join them.
‘You drive a hard bargain, Miss Granger,’ Dumbledore had told her.
She took it as a compliment.
And so, Harry and Hermione were like brother and sister. Even more so than before. He spent every holiday at her house, aside from when they stayed at the Burrow here and there, and her parents adored him.
Some called it impulsivity, the things she did, as if she were throwing herself into chaos with the recklessness of a moth to flame.
But that wasn’t fair. The problem was that her mind was a pressure cooker, observation and empathy building up until the logical next step was to act, to resolve the tension, to set things right. It was as if she’d been born with her nerves on the outside of her skin, a constant rawness that made her hyper-attuned to the endless, fidgeting sorrow of the world. How could anyone expect her to just sit there and watch?
She rescued bugs tangled in spiderwebs, carefully replanted flowers her classmates trampled on in the schoolyard in primary school, left water and canned food out for the skinny, feral tomcat that hissed at her near the abandoned boxcar where she liked to play.
And then, when she was seventeen, Hermione rescued Tom Riddle from himself.
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