Rising Powers

Chapter 7: It's A Witch!

On Saturday, Hermione began her day by imagining all sorts of horrific scenarios that could happen later. She was scheduled to bring her parents to the park where they would meet Harry, who would then open a portal to the tree. Hermione wanted to open it herself from her room to show how good she had gotten, but Harry thought that might not be something they would appreciate. Also, Harry thought it would be more like a night out if they actually left her house.

Meanwhile, Harry was exhausting himself conjuring clothes for Willow.

"It's not a casing, it's a regular shirt!" Harry said, exasperated. "I did research! This is the kind of clothing my mother would have worn, and you have the same body as her."

"Research, Harry?" Her son's solution to anything he didn't know about was to head to the library. At least he got magazines instead of a dictionary this time. "You checked out three magazines and looked at the models on the covers. I don't think that your mum would have been reading any of these."

"Why not?" he asked.

Willow held up the magazines. "Knitter's Magazine? Pregnancy & Birth? Good Housekeeping?!"

"What's wrong with that? Those are all things mums do," Harry defended.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Oh, you better hope Hermione didn't hear you think that."

Harry winced. "Well, she did now, in any case." They were getting better control, but it had only been two days and they still let an occasional thought slip through.

"You deserved it! Maybe next time you won't try to dress me."

"Hermione was the one who wanted you to wear clothes, remember? I don't really care," Harry said. "In fact, she doesn't care either. It's just that there's already so many things her parents are going to have trouble accepting..."

Willow sighed in resignation. "Fine. What do you want me to wear?"

Harry held up the magazines. "Your choice."

"Ughh! The woman on the knitting one is three times my age, I am the house, so there's no keeping necessary that doesn't do itself, and I'm not pregnant! Why would you even get that magazine?"

"I can change the sizes," Harry said, ignoring Willow's annoyance completely.

"Harry, get Hermione here right now. If she wants this so badly, she can be the one to make me some clothes," Willow demanded, just as a portal opened and Hermione came through.

"I got the feeling I was needed here."

"Make me some clothes, and keep him away from anything related to it," she said, pointing at Harry, who was rolling his eyes.

Hermione, not knowing anything about fashion, did only marginally better than Harry. Willow reluctantly chose clothes and Hermione conjured them.

"Just make sure that you have them on and they stay on when we get here," Hermione said, and went back to her room, closing the portal behind her.

At 5:00, Harry left to go to the park and meet the Grangers. Hermione was suddenly nervous than she had been all week, and Harry could feel it bleeding into him. Hermione and her parents were on their way.

"Hermione, where is Harry's house, exactly?" Emma asked.

"It's just a few blocks ahead," she said nervously.

They walked in an awkward silence through Little Whinging, Hermione staring straight ahead, Emma staring at her, and Dan glancing between the two, confused. He was told a few days earlier that they would be having dinner at Harry's house to discuss something important, but he did not know what--just that it involved Hermione somehow and that Emma did not like it.

"There he is," Hermione said lifelessly.

"Hermione, why is he here? I thought we were going to his house, not the park."

"We need him to let us in."

"That's what doorbells are for," Emma said.

"He doesn't have one."

Emma rolled her eyes. "So we'll knock."

"I mean he doesn't have a door," she said as they approached Harry, who was sitting on a bench watching some birds. "Hi, Harry."

Harry must not have heard or even felt them coming, because he jumped when Hermione put her hand on his shoulder.

"Er, sorry about that, I'm a bit nervous," he said as he greeted Hermione's parents.

"Harry, why are we in the park? Hermione said we were going to your house." Emma was getting very suspicious, but even more afraid of what she would find that night. Her imagination invented all kinds of horrible scenarios, but none of them were even close to the truth.

"Er--right--well, come this way," he started. "Just remember, everything you will see tonight is real." He led them over to a wall at the park building and started drawing on it with a piece of chalk.

Emma had had enough. "Harry, what's going on? I really hope you didn't bring us out here to watch you draw on--oh my God..." She stopped talking as Harry opened the portal. Harry walked through without hesitation and Hermione followed, pulling her parents behind her.

"C'mon, it's alright," she said as they reluctantly stepped through.

While the Grangers were looking around the tree in awe, Harry was busy glaring at Willow as she hurriedly got dressed. Harry motioned for her to shake hands with them when she finished, and she approached the stunned parents.

"Hello, I'm Willow, Harry's guardian," she said as she shook each of their hands. Oddly enough, that was what knocked them back into being capable of speech.

"But you can't be older than sixteen! That's no age to be having your own children, let alone adopting them!" Emma said.

"I may only look like a teenager, but I'm actually eighty-six," Willow said, secretly glad that she took seventeen-year-old-Lily for even younger than she actually was. If the other trees knew she was glad to seem young, she'd never hear the end of it.

"Eighty-six!?" Emma asked. "That's ridiculous."

"Mum, Willow is a Dryad. She's the spirit of the tree," Hermione said.

Emma turned to her, remembering why they were there in the first place. "Hermione what is all this? How did Harry draw a hole on the wall that opened into a tree? And how is all of this incredible stuff possible?" She looked around. "I mean, look at that! That table is alive! You said you would explain everything. Start."

Suddenly Hermione had no idea what to say. She had been preparing herself all week, and now she was standing there like an idiot, with her mouth opening and closing like a fish. She felt Harry giving her a mental knock on her occlumency shield, and she opened her mind to him.

"Tell her about the first day," Harry thought to her.

"Thanks Harry," she thought back. Hermione quickly composed her thoughts.

"Remember after my first day of school?" she asked her parents.

"Yes. That was a very weird day. You wanted to know whether or not I was a sorcerer," Dan answered.

"Well, that's because I am," she said. "Well, I'm obviously not a sorcerer, I'm a witch."

Harry snickered.

"Well, this idiot sat next to me in class and recognized that I had magic, and he said that he would train me in how to use it."

The Grangers were speechless.

After a while of being stared at, Harry decided to keep going. "So, I tried to teach her everything I knew. She's much smarter than me, so she caught up pretty fast, and now we're sort of learning off each other."

"And when did you find out about...about magic?" Emma finally was able to ask.

"I found out that whenever I was angry or scared, I would do unusual things. I finally realized that I was doing magic, and after thinking some things through, I noticed that the Dursleys didn't like the mention of anything unusual or that could be considered magical. They also didn't like me or my parents. So I figured that they knew I was a sorcerer, and my parents were too"

"And what sort of things can you do?" Dan asked.

"Ask Hermione to do anything and she can usually do it," Harry said. He decided that they wouldn't freak out if they saw Hermione do anything.

"Can you fix that broken vase, Hermione?" Emma had dropped her favorite vase and it broke into too many pieces to fix.

Hermione wore a confused expression. "I thought I did. I put it right back where it was, and there wasn't so much as a scratch."

"Hermione I dropped it on Tuesday."

Hermione blushed, realizing that she had in fact restored it to its exact condition, then slipped up and admitted that she broke it. "Oh. Well. I can fix it. You won't even notice it was ever broken."

Emma narrowed her eyes. "Apparently not. So show us something now."

Hermione considered what she should do.

"Do one of the spells you came up with," Harry suggested. The Grangers were in either complete shock or acceptance of Hermione's abilities. Probably a bit of both.

"Oh, I don't know. You pick something," she said to her parents.

"Can you draw a hole in the wall like Harry did?" Dan asked.

"Of course! That's the only way in here," she said proudly as her parents looked impressed.

"Actually, you can also teleport in, but I don't think you ever learned that; you just went straight to portals," Harry said. "I haven't done that in a while, now that I think about it."

"Why don't we continue this conversation over dinner?" Willow suggested. "Hermione, you can set the table."

Hermione got her hint right away as they moved over to their new, longer, table.

"Okay, watch this," she said to her parents as she conjured the plates and silverware.

"Hermione! Is this my grandmother's china set?" Emma asked. It had gotten lost when they moved, and she was heartbroken over it.

"No, but it's the same design and everything. It's impossible to tell these from the originals. You can take them home when we leave."

"Wow, that's incredible," she said. "It won't have the same sentimental values as my grandmother's did, but it will have a whole new value." Everyone smiled as they sat down.

"What does everyone want to eat?" Harry asked.

"Well, what do you have?" Dan asked.

"Anything that you can imagine. At least, anything I have had before. I've never had duck before, for example. You wouldn't want your duck tasting like carrots or something, would you?" Harry asked rhetorically. "And you can have any kind of food, and it will have a perfect nutritional value. No fat or bad things in it at all."

"Lasagna!" Emma screamed, and blushed when everyone looked at her. "What? I like it, but it's so fattening."

Harry conjured a large plate of lasagna for her. "Well, that's the point, isn't it? What does everyone else want?"

After Harry conjured food for everyone except Willow, they began to eat. Emma noticed Willow sitting there and asked her about it.

"Aren't you going to have anything, Willow?"

"I'm a dryad. As long as my tree is healthy, I am too."

Emma blushed. "That's right; we were just talking when I got distracted."

"Nothing to worry about; it's a lot to take in. To make a long story short, Harry sat in my tree when he was teaching himself to use magic. He recognized that trees are sentient beings and formed a connection, a sort of friendship with me. By pure coincidence, Harry's mother did the same thing when she was seventeen. Because of that, I was able to use the magic that Harry was almost constantly giving off to come into existence with his mum's image. I also control the growth of all the furniture in here, and the basic structure of the place."

Emma was confused. "So why Willow? I thought this was an oak." Willow, Hermione, and it seemed a few animals that Emma just noticed were lurking near the table rolled their eyes and looked at Harry.

"Harry thinks Oak is an old grumpy man name. Willow is much better for a girl, he says." Hermione obviously was used to Harry's habit of naming things...stupidly.

"But trees are androgynous," Emma argued.

"Yes, but Harry has absolutely no consideration for other people," Willow joked. "And I guess the name has grown on me."

"Was that supposed to be a pun?" Harry asked. "And you guys think I'm bad."

Emma took a while to get it. "That reminds me, don't dryads traditionally wear clothes made of leaves or something? You dress very...Hermione-like."

"Well, she thought it might be easier on you if I wore these choking hazards. Which will never happen again, do you understand?" she said to Hermione, who rolled her eyes.

They talked about magic and gave the Grangers a basic idea of what was going on. They were glad to hear that Harry got to spend a day with his mother. They may have been very suspicious and apprehensive about that night, but they really liked Harry.

"Well, I think it's just about time for us to get going," Emma said. "Thanks, Harry, for teaching Hermione about magic, and just for being her friend. It means a lot to all of us."

"Of course. Hermione can make you a portal to your house," Harry said as he waved goodbye.

Hermione made them a portal to their living room, and the Grangers were surprised when they saw that it did not lead to the park like they expected. They walked through, and Hermione closed it behind them.

"Why didn't you just do it from here?" Dan asked.

"Well, we thought it would be better--y'know, if--if you saw Harry do it first," she said, and burst into tears as her father drew her into a hug, followed immediately by her mother.

"We always knew you were special, Hermione, but we never thought it would be something like this," Emma said. "Did you think that we wouldn't want you or something silly like that?"

She nodded miserably from her place in Dan's chest.

"That would never happen, Hermione. Ever. I promise." She tightened the hug, and let Hermione have a purging cry.