Lovelight

Thank You For The Music

Hopes and dreams were for idiots.

Maia had firmly come to this conclusion after more than enough days had passed in which she was not able to deduce who her father was. James had instilled in her that she would be able to figure out which one of the men it was, that her hopes and dreams would be able to come true that day when his father arrived on the little island.

Well, so far, at least, he was wrong. Therefore, hopes and dreams were for idiots.

Besides, even if she did have a dream of meeting her father and getting to know him, cultivating a relationship with him, it wouldn't have worked. Sure, she could have a relationship with the man, whoever he was, but it wouldn't have been able to properly interact with him, not with the way her mother was acting.

After she had confessed everything to James, they had talked a bit more before he was pulled away by Teddy to go take care of something for the bachelor party. Maia had waited the few hours until it was time for she, James, Harry, and Hermione to dine together before leaving her room, but once she had, she had overheard her mother confiding in her friend from where she had stood in the hallway.

"Why don't we get going downstairs?" her future father-in-law had asked, his voice carrying into the hallway and prompting Maia to stop before the door to her mother's room, pulling out her wand and casting a silent disillusionment charm to ensure she wouldn't be caught.

"No!" Hermione had shouted, so quickly and intensely that it made the younger witch jump in her hiding spot, almost dropping her wand and alerting the others to her location. "No ‒ No, I can't go down there yet, I just can't."

"Hermione, you can't keep hiding from this forever ‒"

"And why can't I? I'm not hiding from anything, I just purposefully am not discussing something. It is too painful of a topic and I don't feel the need to bring it up with anyone, most certainly not my daughter."

"And you don't think that you should at least tell her something?" Harry asked, his voice taking on a gentler tone, one that Maia had heard from her own mother a countless number of times. "Maia deserves to know why there are three men here, three men who could possibly be her father."

"What she doesn't know won't hurt her ‒"

"You cannot seriously believe that, Hermione. She's your daughter, for Merlin's sake, she's not an idiot. I wouldn't be surprised if she had already figured something out as an explanation for why they're here."

Maia couldn't see her mother or her friend, but she knew the look that was plastered over her face, the shock and the judgment of the audacity he would have had to say such a thing. If it was Maia who had said something as snippy to her she would have been chastised, and she fully expected the woman to do it to her friend when ‒

Hermione Granger wasn't one to cry. Maia had only seen it happen a handful of times over the course of her life.

The first was when Maia was seven and had come down with dragon pox, her mother finally letting go of her stoicism to cry at her bedside when she thought the girl was sleeping.

The second was when Maia went off to school for the first time. She had watched through the window of the Hogwarts Express, James seated at her side, and waved just as the train started to pull away. As soon as Maia had lifted her hand, her mother had wiped a tear from her face. The letter Hermione had sent her a week later, congratulating her daughter on being sorted into Gryffindor had been stained with tears, tears which had apparently been attempted to have been removed, if the unnatural ink smudges meant anything.