The Rule of Three

Part One: A Bedroom In Surrey

The room was dark, but Hermione Granger was not afraid. She was not afraid, for no matter how all-encompassing the dark would become, this room was familiar. After all, she had first found herself there at the tender age of fifteen. Hermione was not afraid, until...

"NOOOO!!!!" A flash of light and a terrible, high-pitched screaming brought Hermione crashing back into reality, where she found herself sitting rigidly upright and sweating slightly in another familiar place-- her bedroom. She had been dreaming again, only dreaming...the lights, the sounds, the smell of the place had all been in her head. Hadn't it? As she shook the sleep slowly from her eyes, she found that she was wrong. Outside, lightning was flashing furiously in the inky sky, as though making rips in its intricate velvet tapestry. She soon realized that the screaming, too, had not been entirely a figment of her subconscious, for as she pulled back the cream-colored sheets of her bed, a tiny girl came bounding into the room, latching herself quickly to Hermione's thigh.

"Mum," she cried softly, burying her face in the dream-cushioned sheets. "Mum, I'm scared."

Slowly, Hermione's mind registered the scene. She was there, in her bedroom in Surrey, alone, save for the tiny girl at her bedside. "Lily," she said quietly, reaching out to the mop of curls atop the child's head. "Did the lightning scare you?"

"No," said the girl, whimpering as she slowly pulled her face from the covers to peer into her mother's eyes. "I...I had a bad dream."

"Bad dream?" Hermione cooed soothingly. "Well, why don't you come up here and tell me about it? It'll help to make it less scary." She smiled, and the girl obeyed.

"Well..." Lily began, tucking her blonde head under her mother's arm as she spoke, "I'm not quite sure where I was, but I know that it was an awful sort of place. Dark and dank and really foul-smelling. But I felt like I'd been there before. And I wasn't afraid, until..."

Hermione swallowed hard in an attempt to shut out all thoughts of the "until" in her own dream. "Until what?"

"I heard a scream." said Lily, cowering, almost, at the sound of her own voice forming the words, as if she, too, might scream at any moment. "It was a dreadful sound, and it gave me such a fright, and then...then you were there. But you were young, like in school, sort of. And you were with these other lads; I don't suppose I've ever seen them before. But the look on your face, Mum...you were dead scared!"

Her breath quickening as panic ran cold through her blood, Hermione did her best to reply calmy and evenly. "You were screaming, love."

But the little girl persisted. "I know. I know, Mum. Because I was scared for you...this other man, he didn't look very friendly at all, and I thought he might...well, the way you were looking at him, he--"

"Other man?"

"Yes. There was another man there, a very dodgy looking one, and he kept laughing and laughing, and then he said something I couldn't understand, raised up his hand, and--"

"What?" Her teeth now chattering with nerves, Hermione lashed out in the hopes of one last chance to return her daughter's story from where she feared it might be going. "What did he do?"

"He shot out this...this light! Right out of his hand, Mum! And he knocked the three of you-- you and your mates, I mean-- right up into the air! It was like you were flying or something for a moment. And then..." The child called Lily burst into sobs, never to finish her story. But Hermione didn't need to hear the end to know the outcome. She had, after all, lived it, and could not only recount the rest of the story but could also fill in the gaps left by things her daughter hadn't mentioned and, hopefully, hadn't seen at all. But she would do neither. Instead, she simply said, "Don't be daft, Lily. You know perfectly well that people can't...fly."

Part Two: The Misses Granger

Moving back into the Muggle world had been Hermione's choice. However, it had been one of the three most difficult decisions she would make in her life, and she often questioned whether she had in fact chosen the right path. No one had ever bothered writing a book about this, after all. What To Do When Your Unborn Child's Father Is Presumed To Have Been Blown To Oblivion by an Evil Dark Lord. What a mouthful! Of course, he wasn't exactly presumed dead, really...Lily's father was dead...whoever he was.

She could remember, vividly, the day she had enrolled Lily in a private daycare facility in a nice part of town...the day the decision was finalized, made permanent both by words spoken and unspoken, a creed of the mouth and of the heart. A tall, pretentious woman peered down her nose at Hermione's shrinking figure, her brown hair curled into a sleek bun. "Mrs...no, I'm sorry...Miss Granger, is it? I see here that you have neglected to fill in the space on your daughter's application marked 'father'. Shall I fill it in for you? What is...ah...Lily's father's name?"

Hermione was staring down into her purse, her hands stroking slowly over a pair of pictures, her eyes welling up with pain. She had taken these pictures with a Muggle camera on the train, hoping to show them to her friends away from Hogwarts. The first was of a tall, red-haired boy, freckled and grinning next to the luggage compartment, a tiny smudge of dirt evident on the side of his nose. In the second picture, another boy, shorter than the first, with the darkest of black hair and piercing green eyes. His round glasses were sliding off the bridge of his nose as he contorted his eyebrows mischieviously, his wand 'tween his teeth. They were the only pictures of the boys she had left...

"Miss Granger?" The woman was tapping her pen irritably against the side of her glasses, still peering down at Hermione with a disgustingly bemused expression.

Snapping her purse shut, Hermione took in a great gulp of air and meekly replied, "I don't know. Er-- there is no father to speak of. Not anymore."

And she had stuck to that theory. From that moment on, Hermione established the absence of Lily's father to be completely normal, as well as everything else about the life of Lily and Hermione Granger. Hermione herself went to work as a typist at the office of a wealthy businessman and took up sewing classes in the evening. She told her classmates that Lily's father was a gorgeous but no-good lawyer who'd run off with his secretary before Lily was born and joked that now, she was the wiser, and aimed to be that lucky sort of helper herself! When Lily was old enough, she enrolled her in a private school where they taught swimming and gave riding lessons and Equestrian shows and everyone was happy.

But, on the inside, Hermione was as shriveled up as the flowers she tried her best to tend to in the garden. Her decision about Lily haunted her every free second, almost more than the rest of the terrible mistakes that had brought her thusfar. This decision meant that she could not even frame the photos of the only two men she'd ever dearly love. She'd simply have to keep them in her purse for all eternity, stealing furtive glances at their frozen, smiling faces until she could burn them and lay down to die.