Of Charms & Thorns

"Has anyone ever told you that you look exactly like your mother?"

A phrase so often spoken to me that it has lost its meaning, yet somehow it still bruises every time. It follows me through corridors, through conversations, through my reflection in the mirror. A curse disguised as admiration.

I hear it from professors, students, and strangers. Everywhere I go, I am her shadow. Little Hermione, the golden girl, the witch of impossible intellect, the hero of the war they always talk about.

Sometimes, I wish I had been born to a nameless family, a nobody with a nobody’s story. Or perhaps a Muggle-born who’d never seen a wand never heard the weight of her mother’s name echoing through Hogwarts’ ancient halls.

It doesn’t help that my father is him — the Boy Who Lived.

He is still the man with the lightning scar and the smile that could soften an army. My father is sunlight, even when he tries to hide from it. He spends most of his time away from the public eye now, preferring quiet adventures to being cornered by flashbulbs and quills. It’s almost comical how he believes a trip to some remote wizarding village will throw the Prophet off his scent. They always find him. They always find us.

He says fame is a curse, but it doesn’t seem to follow him the way it followed her. He has a gentle heart: warm, open, patient. The world forgave him easily. He spends his days travelling with old friends, disappearing into magical ruins, and lost forests, pretending that he’s just another man on holiday. I envy that freedom, the ability to leave, and be no one for a while.

But she never could.

Mother never knew how to be ordinary.

It didn't help that the Daily Prophet loves to remind the world that the Potters still exist. Every headline, a reminder that I was born under a legacy I didn’t ask for. Every photograph is another invasion, as though the world refuses to believe we’re allowed to live ordinary lives.

And then there’s Ron Weasley, Uncle Ron, as I’ve been told to call him. He’s practically a fixture in our home, loud and red-headed as ever, and his wife, Amelia Kowalski-Weasley, is a storm in heels and American charm. They make my father laugh. I like that about them, even when they fill the house with memories I never lived but can somehow feel.

The world loves their stories. The golden trio. The victors of the Second Wizarding War. The ones who saved us all.

But no one writes what happens when heroes grow old. When their legend becomes too heavy to bear.

This morning, the Prophet arrived by owl, as it always does, folded neatly and trembling in my hands. I almost didn’t open it. I almost wanted to let it burn in the fireplace. But curiosity is inherited, and hers was insatiable.

And so I read it.

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A REQUIEM FOR HERMIONE GRANGER

The Wizarding World Mourns the Loss of Its Brightest Witch

By Calliope Merrythorn, Senior Correspondent for The Daily Prophet

Hermione Jean Granger, former Minister for Magic and acclaimed author of “Truth Beyond Law,” passed away peacefully at her family home last night. She was 42.

Known for her brilliance, compassion, and uncompromising integrity, Granger’s contributions to magical law and equality have reshaped wizarding society for generations. She is survived by her husband, Harry James Potter, and their only daughter.

Sources close to the family say the funeral will be private. In accordance with her wishes, no magical press coverage will be permitted.

---

I stopped reading after that.

As painful as it sounds, the world learned about it before I did. That’s the kind of cruelty only the press can manage to take what is intimate and make it public before it reaches the people who matter most.

The ink blurred as my tears fell, though I told myself I wasn’t crying. Not really.

I should have expected this. She had been fading for months, her mind lost somewhere between the books she once loved and the quiet she had started to prefer. The paper said she went peacefully. I don’t know what peace looks like when it comes to her.

The world loved my mother. But the world never really knew her.

They called her brilliant. They called her fierce. They called her the woman who rewrote wizarding law and defied bloodlines. And maybe she was all of those things. But to me, she was just... gone.

The silence in the house tonight must feel like a held breath, and yet I hate myself for not wanting to come home. I know that at this hour, Father hasn’t come home yet. Uncle Ron must have sent word that the Ministry is swarming with journalists. They’ll want a statement, of course, they always do.

I fold the paper and press my hand over the ink as if I could stop the story from existing. I can almost hear her voice reminding me not to waste time on foolish sentiment. The truth doesn’t care if it hurts you, she once said.

But this truth feels cruel.

They’ll talk about her for months, perhaps years. Statues, memoirs, new editions of Hogwarts: A History with her annotations printed in gold. They’ll call her immortal in their own way.

And yet, no one will remember the way she looked at the rain when it fell on glass. Or how she always hummed something before she spoke, as if choosing her words like spells. Or how she hated lilies, even though everyone will probably bring them to her funeral.

The world will remember Hermione Granger.

But I... I will always miss Mum.

Hermione Jean Granger Dies at 42. The headline still didn't feel real. No matter how many times I read it, I feel like a stranger, an onlooker on someone else's life. Or so I wish.

I stood there and stared at the words, waiting for them to shift, to rearrange themselves into something less permanent. But they didn’t. They never would.

Hermione Granger had always belonged to the world before she belonged to her family. She, the brilliant witch, the war heroine, the woman everyone admired, but few truly knew. And I have tried, I really did, to understand that my whole life. To be proud.

But how do I say that I wasn’t proud now? That I am just tired?

And as much as it made my stomach twist, I could still remember the nights I had wished, just for a heartbeat that I wasn’t her daughter. That I could just be me. Not Granger’s girl. Not the reminder of someone too perfect to hate.

I would have taken it back now. Every selfish thought. Every whispered wish. Because deep inside I loved her so much, it hurt to breathe.

And that was the cruellest thing about loss. It turned even your worst thoughts into relics of love.