She didn't cry at birth.
The nurses and doctor were alarmed at first. The checked her breathing, her heart, her temperature. Everything was normal. But she didn't cry.
Instead, Hermione Jean Granger opened her eyes and looked around the room. Really looked. Her gaze moved slowly–first to the overhead light, then to the nurse, and finally to her mother's face.
Her mother, still weak, blinked.
"She's... alert," she said, surprised more than anything else.
Her father leaned closer and chuckled softly. "Like she's sizing us up already."
They both laughed. It became one of those stories–told to relatives, to friends, to Hermione herself as she grew older. "You didn't cry," they'd say. "You just stared at the world like you already knew what it was."
They brought her home to a quiet little house with yellow walls and polished wood floors. She didn't fuss much. Slept through the night sooner than they expected. Rarely cried unless she was truly hungry. Even as an infant, she was... calm. Not cold, not unfeeling–but collected.
They chalked it up to luck. A quiet baby, an easy start. But they would soon realize that their daughter was not simply easy.
She was exceptional
---
By the time she was six months old, she could babble–not just the usual random syllables, but sounds that followed rhythm and cadence, like speech trapped behind uncooperative muscles. Her parents joked that she was trying to hold a conversation with them, if only her body would catch up.
By thirteen months, she wasn't just standing. She was walking. Deliberately. Purposefully. She moved like someone who knew what walking meant.
At two, she read. Not picture books. Actual books. Newspapers, chapter books, even the back of cereal boxes.
She'd sit quietly flipping pages while other toddlers were still learning the alphabet.
At four, she solved math problems meant for a ten-year-old.
When asked how she knew the answers, she'd just shrug.
"It makes sense," she'd say. "Doesn't it?"
And that was the strangest thing. To her, it did make sense. Like the numbers were old friends. Like the world itself was something she was slowly remembering rather than learning.
By five, it wasn't just numbers. It was everything. Electricity. Refraction. Magnetic fields. How sound travelled faster through steel than through air. She didn't just memorize facts–she understood them. Genuinely, deeply, effortlessly.
Give her a battery, a bulb, and some wire, and she'd light it up in under a minute. Show her a diagram of the water cycle, and she'd nod once and move on–because of course water went up and came down. That wasn't confusing. That was just how it worked.
Her parents stopped trying to find the "right age level" for books. She read encyclopedias like storybooks. Built circuits out of leftover Christmas lights. Once, she explained atoms to her mother using pepper grains, a balloon, and a stainless steel spoon.
Her teachers called it giftedness. Her parents called it Hermione being Hermione. They were amazed–but more than that, they were proud. Deeply, quietly proud.
School, however, was another story. She was kind. Always kind. Shared her lunch. Helped others finish their work. Explained things patiently when asked. But she didn't connect. Not really.
The other children sensed it. That she was different–not in the way smart kids usually are, but in a way they couldn't quite name. She didn't run to play tag. Didn't giggle at nonsense. She wasn't mean. She wasn't a know-it-all. She just... didn't need them.
Some tried to include her at first. Others pushed her away, confused by her calmness, her strangeness. Eventually, they stopped trying altogether. Her teacher noticed and pulled her aside gently one day.
"Are you okay, Hermione? You're not feeling left out, are you?" She looked at her teacher, puzzled, but not cold.
"No. They're just children. They do what children do." That was all she said.
And she meant it.
But at home, she was different.
With her parents, she was open. Affectionate. Hugged often and tightly. Curled into their laps when reading. Kissed her mother's cheek every morning without fail. Her father once called her his little owl, for how often she nestled into his arms and tilted her head to listen.
She didn't hold back with them. Never seemed distant. Never measured. There was something unspoken between them–something her parents didn't quite understand but always felt. But they were happy.
For the world got her mind. But they got her heart.
---
It was just another Tuesday at St. George Primary School. The class was learning about basic multiplication tables. Sevens, today. Hermione sat in a seat by the window in the third row. She was scribbling in her notebook, but not what the teacher was teaching. No, she had moved past all that years ago.
She was working on something way more advanced. She was solving the last problem in the quantum physics book she had. It had caught her eye a few weeks ago, when she saw a garage sale going on in the neighborhoods. Apparently, the old couple who lived there were moving away and were giving away their son's left over things.
She'd asked her father if she could have it.
He didn't hesitate.
Both her parents had long accepted that "age appropriate" meant very little to Hermione. Holding her back would only frustrate her. So they stopped trying to fit her into the curriculum and instead gave her the room to climb.
---
When the bell rang at the end of the day, Hermione packed her things and stepped outside with the other children. A few of them walked alongside her, chatting and laughing. She was part of the group, technically, but not truly engaged.
She was still thinking about the problem she'd solved. The sky had turned strange. A heavy wind had picked up, tugging at jackets and lunchboxes. The clouds had thickened, low and grey, with that bruised-blue tinge that meant something more serious was coming.
Hermione noticed it, but didn't react. She wasn't afraid of storms. She liked weather patterns–read about cumulonimbus clouds for fun. But something about this didn't feel like a typical Tuesday storm.
She walked in silence, lost in thought, as the two girls beside her whispered and giggled about a cartoon they'd seen. One boy was tossing pebbles at a telephone pole. The wind pushed against them harder now, making hair flap and skirts twist.
They were almost near Hermione's house street when she heard one of the boys laugh and say, "Whoa, your hair looks mad right now."
Hermione turned slightly at the sentence–just enough to glance at them.
The boy's hair was standing straight up. All of theirs were.
She paused. Instinct prickled up her spine. A rising tension in the air. A stillness beneath the wind. The way everything seemed to be waiting.
Her own hand drifted to her head. Her curls lifted, pulled toward the sky. Her eyes widened.
She knew this. She'd read about it. What it meant when hair rose like that–when the air became charged.
"Get away from the trees!" she shouted suddenly, her voice sharp with urgency.
The children turned, confused. One laughed nervously. "Now!" she barked, already turning to run.
She sprinted toward the nearest house, but it was locked, gate drawn. No shelter. Her eyes flicked toward a bus stop awning–too far. The wind was screaming now, and the world had gone eerily silent in its center.
No time.
She turned toward home. It was just across the next street. Her legs burned, her bag bounced against her back.
And then–light.
Not from the sky, but from everywhere at once.
A blinding, searing flash.
No time to think. No time to react.
Just the sudden, unimaginable feeling of being ripped out of herself. Unimaginable pain.
And then–
Nothing.