Bulgaria

1

Summary: EWE?. Hermione goes to recover her parents from Austalia, but only manages to bring her father home. The experience leaves them weary, and the two Grangers deal with the experience by moving to Bulgaria—trying to reconcile fantasy with their reality. ViktorxHermione.
Because retrieving her parents is never really dealt with, and provides a perfect opportunity to twist the story line.

Disclaimer: I own nothing I can get a profit from.

....

Dance me; dance me around, 'til my feet don't ever touch down. There's nothing better than being your girl, and if I am our princess then, Daddy, you are the king of the world—Point of Grace

....

Hermione swallowed quietly and zipped up her father's case, carefully checking the bed it was on for any forgotten clothes or books. She wanted to say something but was unable to. That's how it had been between them for most of the day. It was a silence that had been building and preparing to pounce ever since the incident with mother. That was three days ago.

Now the silence had pounced, had its claws in their throats. It was either be silent or do something that would hurt the other.

Hermione knew breaking out into tears would break her father, and she knew that he was scared of scaring her with platitudes. This would make it all real.

Mother wasn't coming back to England with them.

Hermione's mother had always been beautiful. Not in that blonde bombshell kind of way but in that classical way you expect from the princesses in fairytales—as if she had simply stepped out of one of her childhood stories. Hermione had cried over having her father's hair and eyes, so different than her mother's sable hair and almost black eyes against her pale skin.

Her mother had been her Snow White come to life.

In her head she'd always romanticized it—the frog prince and the princess, both saved with a kiss for their happy ending.

She had so wished as a child to be the princess, but all she'd ever felt like was the frog.

She sighed and then stopped, leaning her hands on the suitcase until it felt like her whole body would crumble now that she'd stopped.

The sob caught in her throat and she gave up.

The rug was rough under her knees as she crumpled, her hands dragging across the top of the suitcase before they fell heavily with her arms—the quilt pulled and gathered under her white knuckles. She heard her father drop his shaving kit, making it to her in two long strides as she stared up at him with watery eyes.

Her breath caught around her sobs as she tried to stop, but now that the predatory silence had lifted its paw she couldn't entice it back.

Her father's eyes were just like her own; a tawny brown that didn't invite compliments or even comments. But right now she thought they were the only eyes in the world that understood hers. Her father even had her uncontrollably curly hair (rather, she had his hair; so similar since she'd finally given up brushing her hair into bushy frizz every morning in the vain hope that it would suddenly be as straight and dark as her mother's). And she had his skin too, a pale skin that didn't stay snowy white but flushed rosy at the slightest emotion, and the freckles that cropped up no matter how much sun block she used.

This man was the one who was so like her now.

The physical similarities reflected their same spiritual brokenness.

Hermione chocked on a sob—"I'm so sorry," she managed.

Her father shushed her and pulled her head to his shoulder, wrapping his arms around her and petting her hair. "It's not your fault," he said in a wobbling quiet voice.