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The dreams are soft things, like a fresh set of sheets. He’s sitting next to Hermione at a Little League Quidditch game, children on tiny brooms in the sunset, and on his other side Ginny is cussing out the refs under her breath. He’s playing chess with Snape— an older Snape, without the hollows to his face, and with a bit of grey in the hair— and it’s mate in four; Snape’s good but he’s better. He’s kissing Susan, out on the toe-path by the canal in Woking and her hair is soft in his hands; he’s sitting on the back steps of the Burrow, watching a winter rain slough down, and Harry comes to sit next to him, in a new Weasley sweater (green to match his eyes) and just puts his head on his shoulder. The scar on the back of his hand has faded, but his palm fits in his like it always has.

He wakes in the bolthole, Harry curled into his chest and Hermione’s arm flung over both of them, the wards like a weighted blanket. It’s a habit, from the past few years, to sort through the dreams, try to figure out if they’re prophetic or not, but none of them involve death, so what does it matter? If that’s the future, it’s the future he’s always wanted; if it’s not, it’s the future he’ll try to build. 

A glance at his watch shows that it’s nine at night; they’ve slept through the entire day. There’s blood in Hermione’s hair, and Harry’s glasses are cracked, mud on the frames and under his fingernails. Ron figures he can’t look any better— they’d just fought through the night. 

Fought through the night and won. 

Ron lies there, on the mattress Sue derived a transfiguration solution for ages ago, and just watches Harry and Hermione breathe for a long moment. Pieces of the battle jut out like broken glass— Draco shattering the diadem with the sword; Millie moving through the castle with blood dripping from her eyes and the Hogwarts ring on her finger; Hermione incanting the counter to sectumsempra before Charlie could bleed out. How quickly avada had come to him, when it had been about keeping Neville alive: get the fuck away from my mate. 

Snape’s blood wet and tacky on his hands, and how Harry’s shoulders had slumped in relief when he’d found his pulse. The silver yearling deer, and the letter from Dumbledore—

Ron stares at Harry’s scar, blood scabbed over the lightning bolt, and tries to wrap his head around the fact that his best mate had a piece of Voldemort’s soul inside him for years. And instead of just— of just telling them— Dumbledore had sent a letter with Fawkes informing them that the only way to end it would be for Harry to walk out and meet death himself.

He rubs his finger over the ring on his finger. There’s no denying it now, is there— somewhere along the way, they’d mangled the very rules of life and death. Hermione had died on that beach, bleeding out beneath their hands; Harry had been killed by a bolt of green in the forest, laid out on the leaves. He’d died there, for a minute or two, in the early snow in the Forest of Dean. It’s fine, they’re fine, he tells himself, but he can’t help but shiver, at the enormity of what they side-stepped.

Of how Dumbledore couldn’t have known they would bring Harry back from the other side. Even with Harry a heavy weight against him, he can still feel the fear as he and Hermione had waited in the Headmaster’s office, like a hand around the throat. I can learn necromancy, it can’t be that hard, Hermione had said, and he’d just sat there second-guessing his choices— his dreams came true sometimes but sometimes they didn’t and what if he was wrong? He wanted to end Voldemort, of course he did, but not at the cost of Harry’s life.

(He knows he’s going to be dreaming for years of the way Voldemort’s voice had cut through the watery pre-dawn dark, declaring Harry dead. They could still feel the thread from the ring, but what if it was a lie, what if they’d messed it up, what if—)

We did it, though, Ron thinks, staring at Harry’s face, relaxed in sleep. Volo had worked just like Hermione had said it would, and Voldemort’s body had been still and empty on the flagstone. And Snape had been on their side all along, and had hugged Harry with the manic relief of a parent. Locket, cup, snake, something of Gryffindor’s or Ravenclaw’s— they got them all, and then some. The quest is over, and now—

His thoughts turn towards the Burrow, and his mum’s cooking, and Susan, and for the first time in a long time the future feels tenable.

Harry stirs, and then shoots upright, breathing hard, his hand going for his wand. “It’s alright, we’re alright, mate,” says Ron, even as Hermione jerks to alertness too. “We killed him, we’re in the bolthole. We’re okay.” Harry’s wild green eyes find his, and Hermione’s got her hand out, feeling for magic with power she probably doesn’t have right now— like after the beach, Ron feels hollowed out, all his magic spent on bringing Harry back. 

“We got him?” Harry asks, his voice rough with sleep. 

“Yeah,” says Ron. Hermione heaves out a long breath, her hand relaxing. 

“Ginny? Susan? Everyone?”

“Alive,” says Ron. “All our friends made it out.” 

“Sn— Snape?” he asks, his voice cracking.

“Alive,” says Ron. “On our side the whole time.”

Harry lets out a sigh that seems to come from the very core of him, that Ron thinks might stretch all the way back to the graveyard (or back the cupboard, maybe, even), and then slumps forward into him, putting his head on Ron’s sternum. Around them, the silence of the castle, humming with magic, and the dark slot of the night outside the window, and the liquid bond the three of them have, which has become second nature now. He just always knows where Harry and Hermione are, knows if they need him. 

Hermione rakes her fingers through the clotted mess her hair has become. “What now?” she asks. 

Ron thinks about the Burrow— breakfast cooked by his mum; clean sheets; his family clustered around the table. Harry and Hermione, sleeping in his room in the attic like they’re kids, still.

He looks over at Hermione, who’s chewing on her lip; feels Harry’s weight against him. Hermione’s thinking about her parents, he knows; she hasn’t seen them in nearly a year and the last communication they had with them was Hedwig delivering them a letter back when they were at Bill and Fleur’s. And Harry’s thinking about Snape, because everything this year has been about Snape, but also about Lake District, and finally, finally getting some answers. 

Ron presses his finger into the band of the ring. “I think,” he says. “We need to go see our parents.” He feels Harry tense, even as Hermione’s shoulders slump in relief, and he squeezes his shoulder. “Snape, mate,” he says, and Harry sags back into him.

“Do you— do you think it’s smart to split up?” Hermione asks, rubbing at her face. Ron personally doesn’t think it has anything to do with smart, and everything to do with if the three of them can handle being apart. He thinks of the agonizing wait in the Headmaster’s office and feels his stomach twist, but shoves the feeling away. 

“We need to see them,” he says, his chest keening with want. He knows, if Hermione and Harry asked him, he’d go first to Australia and then to Lake District, and he knows they’d tag along to the Burrow, but maybe all of them just want to go home. “And we can always get back if something gets weird.” 

Hermione lets out a long sigh, and he sees the want in the sharp edges of her cheekbones, the blood dried on her temple. “Harry?” she asks. 

A long moment, and then Harry raises his head, looks between the two of them. He’s still got Snape’s wand and he’s rolling it in his fingers. “If— if I go to Lake District, I think it should probably just be me,” he says softly.

Hermione sighs again. “I really would like to see my parents,” she says quietly, staring at the floor.

Ron swallows, shoving away visions of Hermione bleeding out on the beach and Harry dead in the woods— they came back, they always come back— and gathers himself. “Well, then it’s settled. We’ll— we’ll split up for a couple of days, and then you lot can meet me at the Burrow when you’re ready, yeah?”

Hermione shifts, flexing her hand again. “I can’t exactly make a portkey right now.”

“We’ll use the Come-and-Go Room,” says Harry, slipping Snape’s wand into his holster next to Hermione’s and heaving himself to his feet. His eyes are bloodshot but there’s a set to his face that Ron knows by heart, the look he gets when he knows where he’s going. “There’s no reason it couldn’t just be a door, right?” He holds out his hands, which are smeared with blood and mud both, to Ron and Hermione. He’s right, Ron supposes, even as he takes it. Millie would be proud. 

The halls are silent and empty, but the castle itself crackles with magic, the stones shifting slightly as they limp towards the place where the door appears. The wounds they sustained in the battle are reasserting themselves— the raw sting of cutting curses; bruised shins and arms; burns; the webbed, dark magic-tinged aftermath of hexes. Somehow, he’s still exhausted, and his mind keeps flicking between scenes from the battle and the bodies laid out in the Great Hall— Mundungus, Alice Spinnet, Great-Aunt Muriel. The part of him that could have been Gryffindor tells him that there could have been worse losses; the rest of him is just screaming, because there aren’t acceptable looses, even against someone like Voldemort. 

Millie taught them well, because when they pace in the groove, thinking about where they want to go, the door lets them into an airy room with three doors, standing freely in the center of the space. “If this works, this is a massive security risk,” says Hermione, even as Harry cracks one open, revealing a dusty sunrise over a small town in the desert. 

“If this works, it’s sort of hilarious Draco spent six months trying to fix a bloody cabinet to get Death Eaters in here,” says Ron, opening a door to reveal a misty darkness that has to be the Lake District.

“Worked out well for us that he’s not the sharpest,” says Harry; behind Hermione’s door is the track in Ottery-St-Catchpole that Ron knows even in the dead of night. 

They come back together in the center of the room, the portals of the open doors behind them. Ron looks at Harry and Hermione, and the love in his chest at the very sight of them is like a brasier of flame. Maybe they’re feeling it too, because they all step forward into the hug at the same time, just holding each other for one more long moment. 

“Come to the Burrow, when you’re ready,” Ron says, once they break apart, all wiping at their eyes. 

Harry nods, stepping up to the door that’s just the misty dark of the Lake District. “Love you,” he says.

“Love you too,” says Hermione, flexing her hand and stepping up to the door to the Outback. 

“Love you,” says Ron, and then he steps through into Ottery-St-Catchpole, and when he looks back, there’s nothing but the track and the dark and the threads of the ring, binding him to his crew.

He takes one deep breath, and then another, and keeps his thumb on the band of the ring all the way back to the Burrow. When he sees the crooked silhouette of the house rising against the starry night, the windows glowing like beacons, he feels an ache he didn’t even know he was carrying unhitch in his chest. The wards let him in like they’ve been waiting for him.

Even as he limps up to the kitchen door, he can see that the room is full of people— his mum and Fleur in the kitchen, talking to an exhausted-looking Viktor Krum; the twins with Percy at the table; Neville asleep on Ginny’s shoulder; and is that Susan, talking to his dad—

He fumbled with the knob for a minute, his entire family, plus Neville and the Lovegoods and Susan and Viktor Krum, turning towards him as his manages to make his way inside, blinking in the suddenness of the kitchen light. He looks around for a minute, just taking them all in— Charlie has healed cuts across his face and arms; Bill’s arm is in a sling; Luna’s hair is singed. “I’m back,” he says, his eyes falling on Susan, who is wearing a Holyhead Harpies sweatshirt she must have got off Ginny, but is here, is alive. “I’m back.”

The kitchen dissolves into chaos as his family converges towards him, the twins’s and Ginny’s whoops of delight; his mum and dad embracing him; Susan’s kissing him and Bill and Charlie are whooping too now; Neville’s hugging him like a brother; Xenophilius Lovegood shakes his hand— I knew you would understand the quest— and Percy goes in for a handshake and Ron hugs him instead and then Fleur is making him sit down— we never should have let you leave, you still need to eat more— and then piles food on his plate.

“Where are Harry and Hermione, dear?” his mum asks, once she’s done casting diagnostic charms on him and healing his wounds. Ron feels the threads stretching out to them, and looks up from his plate to the clock, where every single hand is pointed towards home. His mum follows his gaze, and then turns back to him, her face a question.

“Hermione went to Australia to see her parents,” says Ron, between bites. “Harry’s with Snape.” There’s a moment of silence, but it’s Ginny who breaks it, her voice low and controlled, like if Ron answers wrong she’s going to hunt Snape down and kill him personally. 

“And we’re sure he was on our side the whole time?”

Ron thinks about blood drying on his hands, and the silver yearling in the memories, and the way Snape had hugged Harry in the corridor. Looks up at Ginny, meets her burning eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s a long story, but yeah.”

“Well,” says Xenophilius Lovegood, who is leaning against the open window, smoking, an action he’s surely only getting away with because Ron’s mum is too relieved about the war being over to say anything. “I believe it is a story we would all love nothing more than to hear. We are all quite curious about how the three of you came to defeat the Dark Lord.”

Ron looks down at his rapidly emptying plate; Fleur waves her hand and the plate refills. He looks around at his family— Neville and Luna included, he supposes, because his sister has followed in his footsteps, and even Viktor Krum, with his sharp face and blood still in his hair— and Susan squeezes his hand under the table. They’re all looking at him, focused on his every word, and in the woods the Horcrux had said least-loved son but that’s not true at all, is it now? 

He takes another bite, trying to figure out where to start this story. At the beginning, probably, where his best mate’s parents died so he could live. “So. In Godric’s Hollow, Voldemort killed Harry’s parents, and then tried to kill him, yeah?”

The night spirals inward, and he eats three servings of meatloaf and then almost half of one of his mum’s pies as he tells his family about Horcruxes, and a quest, and a dead man’s counter, and a patronus, and how Dumbledore had been a fool, and how yes, Harry had died in the woods.

But then he’d come back. Because the thing the three of them had was just like that, apparently, and they could get back to anywhere, now.

When he goes back to sleep, in the attic room, showered and wearing fresh clothes that he thinks must be Bill’s, all he dreams about is the Burrow kitchen, filled with the people he loves and Merlin, he hopes that’s the future.

_______________

Cindy Granger slides out of bed in the small house behind the health clinic and goes to put the kettle on, standing in the kitchen watching the red sun spill across the sparse desert of Warburton. She and Pete have been out here for a week, doing dental work that the nurse at the health clinic wasn’t qualified to handle. Even with winter coming, it’s still hot, the sun relentless, and it makes Cindy miss the cool and cloudy summers in Birmingham. Every morning, she looks out the windows for the miraculous arrival of a snowy owl, but today, like for the past six weeks, there’s no sign of one. Maybe she’s left us a voicemail on our machine in Perth, Cindy thinks, as she pours the tea, willing her hands not to shake. 

It’s been ten months, since they saw her last. Which might feel slightly more tenable if she’d been at a normal boarding school, staying over breaks to study for A-levels, and not fighting a war.

She takes the tea and the most recent issue of Clinical Dental Investigations (it’s no surprise, really, where Hermione gets it from) out to the dusty back patio. Pete likes to sleep in, before their clinic hours at nine, but she loves the way the sunrise coats the desert in light. Somehow, it makes the aches seem more bearable.

She’s been reading for about fifteen minutes when a flash of motion in the distance catches her eye. She raises her head on instinct, expecting a sheep, or maybe a kangaroo, and instead she sees a figure, walking down the road slowly, a dark shadow against the sunrise. Cindy squints— the health clinic is on the edge of town, and she has no idea who would be walking in at this hour—

The figure shoves at their hair, and then flexes their hand just so, and Cindy knows. “Pete!” she calls, knocking over her cuppa in her haste. “Pete!”

He’s awake, staggering out of bed, and then they’re running; he’s in slippers and she’s barefoot up the dirt road, Warburton still slumbering around them. It’s her, wearing a orange-and-white stripped shirt that must have been Ron’s at some point, and is that blood on her face but she’s here, she’s alive—

Her face splits open when she sees them, and she breaks into a run too— or, an attempt at one, because she’s hurt, somehow— and then crashes into them. She’s thinner than the last time they saw her, and has blood and mud matted in her hair, but she’s here. Warm, real, alive. “It’s over,” she says, through sobs. “We killed him, we won the war. We did it.” 

All three of them are sobbing in the bloody wash of the Outback sunrise, holding each other tightly, unable to let go.

Pete calls off from the clinic for the day, claiming a family emergency. Hermione takes a long shower, and then sits up on the bathroom counter, letting Cindy treat the numerous scrapes and burns she took during the battle. Pete sits in the doorway, Socks on his lap; Crookshanks hops up onto the counter and butts Hermione’s hand until she pets him. The steam has fogged up the bathroom mirror, and she can see every one of her daughter’s ribs, eskers slung across her dark chest, and it makes her angry in a way that scares her, to think about the three of them starving off-grid, trying to save the world.

Ron and Harry are alive and fine— that was about the first question she and Pete had for Hermy, once they untangled their embrace. Ron’s at the Burrow with Molly, and Harry had gone back to Lake District with Severus, who apparently hadn’t betrayed them after all?

“He was playing both sides,” Hermione had explained, as they walked back towards the house, her limping slightly. “Dumbledore was dying, he just got Snape to kill him to make it look like a murder.”

Cindy had spent most of the year cycling through fear and white-hot rage at the thought of Severus Snape. Fear because out of all the wizards, he’d been the only one to take the bond the Trio had seriously, besides Molly and Arthur. Because he knew where they lived and seemed exactly like the type of person to know where the pressure points were. If anyone could track them down in Perth, it would have been him, and she’d had more than a few nightmares of him turning up at their door like a wraith, just to have leverage over the Trio.

Anger because the bastard had been stringing Harry along for six years, acting almost parental towards him, and then after all of it, it had only been about the color of his eyes and Severus’s obsession with his mother? How dare he. How fucking dare he, when Harry was an orphan who hadn’t had a bedroom before he’d gone to Hogwarts, was a clever kid who loved her daughter with everything in him, was a child who deserved something better than a house where no one fed him and someone who only wanted him for what his eyes represented. 

She listens to Hermione explain, about the silver yearling deer, and the oaths, and the lies, and how they’d saved his life and seen his memories and how he’d hugged Harry and handed over his wand without hesitation, and Cindy reluctantly lets him back onto the lineup with her and Pete and Molly and Arthur. There’s still a part of her that wants to give him a good dressing down (or watch Molly give him one— good Lord, that women could yell) but if he’d done all that for Harry, really for Harry— 

Hermione is still talking, but her thoughts come a screeching halt as she turns her arm and sees the word carved into the meaty flesh of her daughter’s forearm. 

“Hermy?” she whispers, but the tone of it makes Pete rise to his feet. “What’s— what this?”

Hermione glances down, and her face twists, pulling her arm back up to her chest protectively. “It’s— well— it’s a long story.”

Pete is standing behind Cindy now, but when she reaches out, Hermione doesn’t resist, lets her uncurl the arm and show the scars spelling out mudblood. Pete inhales sharply. “It’s healed well,” says Hermione, defensively. “Bill— Ron’s brother, you know— got all the dark magic out of it. So it’s not cursed anymore.”

That feels like scant consolation to Cindy, staring down at a slur carved into her daughter’s arm. “Who did this?” she asks, her voice quivering with rage.

“Bellatrix,” says Hermione; Cindy feels a flush of rage at the name, at the women who killed Harry’s godfather and was involved in whatever happened to their friend Neville’s parents.“Nev and Ron’s mum killed her, if it makes you feel better.”

It does a bit, actually. One of the worst parts of this whole year has been the thought of Hermione and Harry and Ron all on their own, fighting a war, while she and Pete did dental work a continent away because the best they could hope to be in Britain were targets. At least Molly and Arthur— and Severus, apparently, in his own obscured way— had been able to be there, on the frontlines. 

Hermione leans back against the mirror. There are bandages on her shoulders and collarbones and ribcage, flares of white. Even though it’s ridiculous, Cindy kisses the disfiguring scar gently, and then rubs some anti-bacterial ointment on it for good measure. Crookshanks climbs all the way into her lap, and Pete kisses Hermy on the forehead before leaving to make breakfast, and Cindy bandages the scabbed cut on her daughter’s forehead, and the burns on her shoulders, and the small scraps on her hands. Doesn’t miss the way Hermione leans into the touch, marveling at how she’s nearly eighteen now, a woman and a veteran and powerful beyond measure, and yet still hers. 

Hermione eats two bowls of oatmeal, four rashers, and several oranges with a single-minded focus that reminds Cindy of Ron. She’s wearing a light flannel Cindy has had for years, and a pair of Pete’s sweatpants, and the ring that Harry gave her is still shining proudly on her finger, wand holstered on her wrist. Cindy can’t seem to stop looking at her— it’s her daughter, who she’s known her whole life, and also somehow a foreign woman, come back thin and bleeding from a quest, with horrific scars and a set to her shoulders that means she’s seen the kind of things Cindy always hoped she’d never have to. Pete is standing against the kitchen sink, just watching her eat, his shoulders slumped in relief. 

They end up in the cramped living room, a new pot of tea and Crookshanks jumping up into Hermione’s lap with proprietary focus. “What— what happened, Hermy?” asks Pete, as the two of them sit opposite her, on the sagging loveseat. The early morning outback sun is laying daggers through the window. Hermione rubs her thumb along the band of the ring, and lets out a long sigh. Swallows.

“Well,” she says slowly. “Remember how after fourth year I— I gave Grandma’s ring to Ron?” Cindy nods; in another life, she thinks she would have assumed it was the start of something romantic; in this one, she understood the Trio were simply moving together, as one, forever. “Ron gave his family ring to Harry, and Harry gave Sirius’s to me. And I— well, after the graveyard—“ Cindy’s heard about the graveyard in only bits and pieces, from Molly and Hermione, and once, very late at night one Easter Break, when he’d been up making tea after a nightmare, from Harry himself. Not all the details, but just enough to know it was awful. “I wanted us to be able to get back to each other from anywhere, if something like that happened again. A sort of— door, you know?” She strokes her finger along the band of the ring. “Well— it turns out that when I said anywhere, I meant anywhere.”

Hermione looks up at them, with her dark, burning eyes— Pete’s color, but the look is all Cindy’s— and tells them a story. About magic beyond the pale, and Horcruxes, and Hallows, and how Hermione had done something of the same caliber, but completely by accident. By the end of it, the tea is long cold, the sun is high in the sky.

“So— the whole time— this power the Dark Lord knows not rubbish— it’s been friendship?” asks Pete, putting down his cup with shaking hands. Cindy is still trying to get over the fact that her beautiful girl and the boys all died at some point on their insane quest.

Hermione looks down at the ring on her hand. “I guess so,” she says. “It sounds a bit stupid when you put it like that, but Voldemort couldn’t make friends for the life of him.”

Cindy thinks of the book-smart but socially clueless daughter they’d seen off on the train to Hogwarts at eleven. How she’d spent her childhood devouring knowledge but never being invited to birthday parties. But then Ron and Harry had been, waiting with open arms. 

Power the Dark Lord knows not, indeed. 

Hermione falls asleep on the couch, Crookshanks a loaf against her ribs. Pete begins to make calls to the volunteer organization, trying to explain that family obligations mean they have to return to Britain, as soon as possible. Cindy, for her part, just watches Hermione sleep— the rise and fall of her chest, the tangle of her curls, the new scars on her hands and face and arms— and marvels at the miracle of this future.

_______________

It’s a long walk from the ward boundary to the house, through a maze of moorland Harry learned by heart the other summer, and he can feel his heart racing behind his ribs. The mist settles over him, soaks through his shirt, and he shivers in the dark, letting his lumos illuminate the crooked track. Somehow, there is a thing to this pilgrimage that’s even more terrifying than walking out to meet Voldemort— he believed the ring would bring him back, and he had the ghosts to keep him company, the sick pull of the Resurrection Stone. 

And he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what Voldemort would want from him. Snape, on the other hand—

He curls his fingers around Hermione’s vine wand and incants softly; silver light fills the night as Prong steps out, his hooves not touching the heather. Tilts his head, his single antler jagged in the mist, as if he’s asking where are they? 

“Just— just walk with me a bit,” he says, feeling a bit foolish, but Prong falls in beside him all the same. 

Harry thumbs over the band of the Prewett ring, thinking of the kitchen at the Burrow, where he can feel Ron is now. If this doesn’t work, I’ll just go there, he thinks, letting out a tense sigh, forcing his way forward in the gloom. I know how they all feel about me. 

The Burrow means Ron, and Mrs. Weasley and Fleur cooking, and Ginny, and he wants to go there, he really does. But down in the dale of heather is the house that’s felt the most like home of all the places he’s ever been, is Snape, and—

He looks over at Prong, thinking of the yearling deer in the forest. How sure he’d been that it was one of his parents, come back somehow from the dead. And his mum and dad are dead— otherwise the Stone wouldn’t have brought them back— but Snape—

I think we need to go see our parents, Ron had said, in the bolthole, and Harry had been thinking about his mum and dad, their faces so young and so full of longing and then Ron had nudged him and gone Snape, mate, and Harry had forgotten how to breathe for a moment. It’s an absurd thing to want, to claim, but—

(He’s mine, Snape had said in the memory, looking at Dumbledore as the yearling deer trotted out across the Headmaster’s office, and the thing in his face had looked like his mum’s, his dad’s in the woods, something certain, something he thinks he’s waited his whole life for.)

Harry crosses a final ridge and sees the beacon of light that is the porch light, burning into the gauze of the mist, and takes a deep breath. He’s afraid, he won’t deny it, but he’d also come here because if he’d gone to the Burrow, he would have lain awake all night just wondering. Just wanting. 

Prong nudges at him, as if to say go on, you idiot. Harry swallows, and then heads down into dale, the mist clinging to his face and hair.

Prong fades on his own accord as Harry mounts the porch steps, the wood creaking under his weight, as if he understands he’s no longer needed. He runs his thumb over the band of the ring, feels Hermione in the Outback, Ron at the Burrow; getting to them would be like stepping over a threshold. If Snape doesn’t—

He won’t, Harry tells himself, trying to remind himself about the patronus and the hug and the fact that he still has the man’s wand, but his hand is still shaking as he raises his fist to knock.

Three sharp raps, three steps back. No wand in hand. One breath, then another. He has just long enough to wonder if Snape’s here, before the door is jerked open, spilling out a rectangle of light into the shadows of the porch.

Snape stands in the threshold. No wand visible, but even though Harry has his, he’s got backups. For a long moment, they just look at each other. Snape’s wearing sweats (black, of course), and without the pomp and circumstance of his robes, it’s clear how thin he is. White bandages peak out of the collar of his shirt, covering half of his neck and throat; his hair is clean and pulled back, like he’s about to brew. 

“Should I go up and assist your… friends… with the ward boundary?” he asks; his voice is raspy, but there. 

Harry’s heart twists at the effort he’s making. Swallows. “They— well, Ron’s at the Burrow, and Hermione went to Australia to see her mum and dad.” Snape gives a slight nod. Harry presses the band of the ring and takes a deep breath; after the battle and the year he’s had, he’s done hedging. He wants to know. “We all just wanted to see our parents, I guess.”

That hits Snape right in the chest, and Harry watches his impassive facade shatter into something between awe and shock and something that in a different man might have been joy. Harry feels the bubble of anxiety he’s been nurturing since they won the battle evaporate. “Harry, I—“ begins Snape, still standing in the threshold, and maybe it’s the relief; maybe it’s the Gryffindor; maybe it’s the fact that they just saved the world, but Harry doesn’t hesitate, not this time. He knows what he wants. He steps forward and hugs him.

There’s a different caliber to this one than either of the previous two. Snape’s arms come up around him slowly, and there’s a light touch of magic as he non-verbally dries his clothes. His hand is in Harry’s matted hair; Harry’s head is slotted under Snape’s chin. It’s a tight, dense embrace, but without the desperate, grief-stricken edge the last two had. The smell of Snape’s magic, like gunpowder and mud, hangs around them, and Harry realizes this is the first time Snape’s ever called him by his name. 

Snape doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to. The way he’s holding him says it all.

They break apart, eventually, and Snape ushers him into the warm house with a light hand on his shoulder, muttering a diagnostic charm under his breath. Harry feels a bit light-headed from the hug, and the fact that he’s here at all. The house is almost the same as it was when he left it almost two years ago now, the light-colored wood and the tile on the kitchen counters and the squishy couches. 

“Go shower,” says Snape, nudging him in the direction of the stairs. “I’ll leave some clothes for you.” 

The warm water is heavenly, and the dregs swirling around his feet are muddy and bloody. There’s a pile of clothes on the counter that Snape must have Switched in, black sweats with brewing stains in a few places that mean they were his. He stares at himself in the mirror for a long moment— his scar is still raw and split; his glasses are cracked and mangled; there’s a bright line of a cutting curse across his chin. He touches the ring idly, feeling the threads; something about this all feels like a dream. Like he’ll walk out of the bathroom and he’ll be back in the tent, starving and exhausted and several Horcruxes to go.

(Like he’ll walk out of the bathroom, and the house will be empty, and then the house will turn into the Dursleys’s house in the suburbs, and he’ll wake up gasping for breath in the cupboard, chastising himself for even daring to hope he could get things like this.)

He shoves at his hair, and then pulls it back with the tie Snape left. When he cracks open the door to the bathroom, he smells the scent of cooking rashers wafting through the house, and his stomach cramps. 

Snape’s in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up. “Sit,” he says, as Harry approaches, stepping away from the food and waving his hand to incant cooking charms over them, like Harry’s seen Mrs. Weasley do. Harry sinks down in a kitchen chair; Snape pulls over the one next to him and settles himself in it, and then draws his wand— or rather, a wand, because Harry still has his.

“Do you want—“ Harry asks, reaching for his holster; Snape shakes his head, reaching out to cup Harry’s face in his hand, sealing up the cut on his chin. His fingers are deft and gentle as he turns his head, muttering healing spells, and Harry find himself leaning into the touch.

As the rashers cook, Snape heals every wound he sustained in the fight with a meticulous precision— the web of burns on his shoulder blade; the cutting curse slices on his forearm; the spill of dark magic from a hex. Outside, the mist is shifting into an actual rain, and Harry shuts his eyes as Snape seals closed a mange of scrapes on his collarbone. 

The rashers are perfect, as is the oatmeal. Snape pours the tea as the rain slops down the dark windows and then takes his cup and stands, leaning against the counter, looking at Harry. The steam billows around his pale, bony face. 

Taking watches in the snow, hunger like a wraith stalking his footsteps, Harry had composed list after list of questions to put to Snape. Forged every line of insult from the lawn fight into fodder for a crucio. But with the pensive’s worth of memories pulsing liquid through his brain, and the weight of those two hugs seeping down into the water table of his being, all of that feels impossibly distant. What did it matter, about an overhead Prophecy and a vow and the color of his eyes? Nothing is ever simple; all that matters is that he’s here now. 

“When did it change?” he asks, running his thumb over the band of the ring. Snape shuts his eyes briefly, swallows. 

“After you left here two summers ago,” he says, careful, like he’s willing his voice not to crack.

“Can I— can I see it again?” Harry asks. Snape looks at him for a moment, and then nods, putting down his mug and incanting, his spell a raspy whisper.

The silver yearling steps out into the kitchen, spilling frosty light on every surface. Tilts its head, the single antler bud velvety, and then crosses to Harry where he sits at the table, nose soft and warm under Harry’s trembling hand. 

“Mum and Dad’s changed too,” he tells Snape without really meaning to, and sees Snape still out of the corner of his eye. “We— we found some letters at Grimmauld, to Sirius. They were fawns, after— after they had me.”

The yearling vanishes under his palm, and when he looks up Snape has his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking. Harry looks away, back at his tea; thinks of Ron casting the patronus in triplicate; thinks of how volo was all of them, standing together. Thinks about the cupboard and the Before and how maybe he would have fought the whole war to have this kind of love. 

“I saw you dead,” says Snape, bluntly, a few moments later. He’s pulled himself back together, hands braced on the counter, but his eyes are red-rimmed. “The Dark Lord certainly thought you dead. And your enchantments holding me in the Shack wouldn’t have collapsed if you were still alive.” He works his jaw, crosses his arms. “You were talking to the Dark Lord about Horcruxes.” 

There’s a thing to his voice that is a question. No judgement, not from Snape, but still a question, one Slytherin to another.

Harry shakes his head. “The Horcruxes were Voldemort’s. That was the quest Dumbledore left us with.” 

Snape stiffens slightly at the mention of Dumbledore. “He made two, then?”

Harry shakes his head. “He made seven.”
Snape lets out a low hiss. “Seven?”

He explains the barest bones of the quest— the diary, the ring, the snake; the cup, stashed in the vault at Gringotts; the diadem at Hogwarts behind the curse on the DADA position. 

The locket. “He hid it in a cave, on the seashore. There’s— there’s this boat, and this lake, and inferni—“ He shivers, despite himself. “That’s where Dumbledore and I were coming back from, that night.” 

Snape’s eyes narrow. “You told the Dark Lord—“

“When he hid it there, he asked Regulus for Kreacher’s help,” Harry says, staring out at the window but seeing only Regulus, with his neat curls and that Slytherin paranoia. “Voldemort told Kreacher everything, and then left him there.”

Snape lets out something that could have been a chuckle. “And the Dark Lord did not think to ward against house elf apparation.”

Harry nods. “He told Regulus everything. And Regulus—“
Snape shuts his eyes briefly. “He sent it back with Kreacher, presumably.” Harry nods. “He always was clever like that.”

Rain, on the roof. Harry thinks about the records with Regulus Arcturus Black scrawled across them sitting on the shelf in the living room, and the gall it took to create volo, and wonders if his body is still in there, in the cave.

“And the seventh?” asks Snape.

Harry swallows, staring down at his cup of tea, and then does his best to explain. About Godric’s Hallow, which makes Snape go rigid, and the letter Fawkes had brought.

“You mean to say,” says Snape, velvet soft in a way that Harry knows is dangerous, and he looks up from his tea to find the man with crossed arms and glittering eyes, “Dumbledore left you a letter informing you you were a Horcrux, and the only solution was for the Dark Lord to kill you.”

Harry nods. 

Snape flexes a hand, recrosses his arms. The kitchen reeks of gunpowder and mud, and Harry has the singular impression that Snape is barely managing to keep his anger contained. It’s deeply gratifying.

“Even if you believed it, what possessed you to go out to meet death?” asks Snape.

Harry puts his thumb back on the ring. Snape narrows his eyes, and then is across the kitchen at once, pulling up the chair next to Harry and picking up his hand with the ring. A flash of magic and the threads that Hermione had made visible in the Headmaster’s office pour out, spilling gold into the kitchen. Snape stares slack-jawed at it for a moment. “Miss Granger, I presume,” he says finally; Harry nods.

“We can get back to each other from anywhere, now,” says Harry, and Snape inhales sharply as the realization hits, his eyes wide. 

“You—“

“I did die,” says Harry. “We all did. But then we came back.”

He’s not expecting another hug, but he curls into it all the same. We won, he thinks, Snape’s hand in his hair and the rain pounding at the glass.

We won. 

_______________

May 6th dawns wet and soggy, the soft din of rain on the roof and Hedwig coming in from the night soaked. (Though her letters are unscathed, which he supposes makes sense given that this is the bird that outwitted several Death Eaters for months. Maybe they’ll give her an Order of Merlin.) The Dark Lord has been dead for three days; Harry has been here for two nights. I’ll probably go to the Burrow tomorrow, he’d said at dinner yesterday, and Severus had nodded— of course Harry would want to go see the Weasleys; he’s still struggling to wrap his head around the fact that he’d come here at all, let alone first— and then Harry had gone but I’ll probably be back for breakfast, and he still doesn’t know what to do with that.

With the fact that the war is over and Harry knows everything and yet still wants to be here. 

He takes a deep breath, then another. Harry is still asleep; last night he’d been woken up from a nightmare of his own (Harry drowning in the pool in the woods) by one of Harry’s (Hermione bleeding out on a beach, he’d told him over the third cup of tea) and they’d sat in the pouring darkness of the living room for a long time, until Harry had fallen back asleep with his head on his leg. 

In sleep, with his face relaxed, he doesn’t look much like James or Lily. His hair is wild and almost as long as Severus’s, now; his cheekbones are sharp, and there’s a slightly ashy, unhealthy pallor to his skin. Snape mutters a few spells over the still-healing cuts on his nose and hands; Harry shifts slightly under the warm wash of magic, curling closer into the arm Severus has over him. 

The scar that started all this is still raw and inflamed. Having an additional day to think about the fact that not only had the Dark Lord had made multiple Horcruxes (one or two, Severus might have guessed, but seven), Harry had been one of them, has not made the whole affair any easier to stomach. The more he thinks about it, the more gratified he is about killing Dumbledore, who sent three teenagers alone on a quest to find the Dark Lord’s most precious artifacts. Keep him out of the loop, fine— he was a spy, and as Headmaster he’d really been in no position to help. But Minerva, Molly, Kingsley? 

He thinks again of how thin Harry had been, in the woods when he’d put the sword in the pool— how thin all of them had been— and feels his magic crackle, like it does when he builds avadas. Rage and disgust and fear all intermingled together.

If he’d had his way, he would have made him leave Ron and Hermione out of it, Snape thinks, running his fingers lightly through Harry’s hair. He thinks about the house in the suburbs, and how Dumbledore hadn’t told him killing him would leave him with a target on his back from the Dark Lord, and Harry starving in the woods for months, and the Horcrux—

He ghosts a finger over the scar. All these years, a Horcrux eating holes in Harry, and Dumbledore had held that card to his chest until the last possible minute, so that Harry wouldn’t have time to overthink it, or try to fix it, just to die—

You already killed him, he reminds himself, but the avada on top of the tower had been a sham of a thing, the work of months— boring staff meetings, ignored abuse cases, his shame in the snow, all shored up with a healthy dose of his own need to protect his cover and his desire for Dumbledore to stop suffering. The rage he feels in his chest now is hungry, incendiary. 

The rain picks up, and Harry shifts slightly. Snape had noticed years ago that all three of them were wearing the wrong rings— and for Harry to give away the Black Heir ring it had to be something big— but he’d never expected the scale of it. That somehow, Hermione had tapped into something completely beyond them, woven a net of magic between the three of them so dense it could be followed back from anywhere. 

All of us, Harry had said; he hadn’t elaborated but Severus can put the pieces together. He thought Hermione must have derived the sectumsempra counter on the fly, but instead Ron had bled out— he’d just come back. And Bellatrix had bragged about the manor after the fact— at least I got that mudblood bitch— and Severus has interrogated and then obliviated Sue Li, found out that the three of them were in fact fine, but from Harry’s dream it sounded like she’d died too, and Harry—

I didn’t go out there planning to die, he’d said last night, when they’d been sitting at the table, taking the year apart and putting it back together. Or— well— I was planning to come back.

At least he hadn’t walked out to his death like a Gryffindor martyr, Severus supposes, but he doesn’t think he’d ever been more terrified in hie entire life than seeing Hagrid carrying Harry’s body. When he’d come to in the Shack, the spells sloughing off him, he’d been hurt and unable to speak, but alive and still armed, with no need for covers anymore. He’d killed his way back up to the castle, and then he’d seen Harry, like that, and everything had gone liquid and white-hot. To come all this way and then loose everything that actually mattered? Unthinkable. 

But he’d come back. He’d come back and Severus had thought it had been some kind of cruel trick, some last hideous deception or hallucinatory after-affect— but then the memories had held true. And maybe the embrace had been one step too far, but he’d fucked up so much already, what was one more thing, if it was his kid standing there—

He can feel Harry breathing under his arm where it’s curled over his ribcage, and it’s almost perversely comforting. The Dark Mark has turned from bright black ink to ropy scar tissue, outlining the snake and skull, and that, more than anything, makes him think it might actually be over. Stray memories flicker before his eyes, now that there’s no facade to cram them down behind— Harry, stepping out from the student body, too thin and bristling with rage but alive. All the nights he’d ended up outside Minerva’s door at Hogwarts, listing off the reasons why he couldn’t knock until he’d talked himself down. The golden wash of Hermione’s brilliant counter— volo vivre, Harry had said— and how for just one more moment, Reg and Lily had stood in front of him, like he was worth that much. How Harry had looked the Dark Lord in the eyes and gone Snape’s not yours, he’s mine. The thought of Regulus, at nineteen, drowning in a dark sea cave just to give them a fighting chance against the Dark Lord. The yearling, trotting out with the least effort he’d ever expended for a patronus, to meet Harry in the kitchen the other night— no matter how hard he’d tried over the past two years, there was no denying where his compass of a heart pointed. 

How he’d woken up after the battle, after the best sleep he’d had since the Dark Lord had come back, to the wards announcing Harry’s arrival. Which hadn’t made any sense (which still doesn’t make any sense). Waiting at the door for Harry to make the long walk from the ward boundary, he’d come up with reason after reason, each one worse than the last. Harry was coming to arrest him; Harry was coming to demand answers with glittering eyes and a crucio; Harry was coming to kill him for the betrayal. Not that it really mattered; he’d put his wand away, standing there with his forehead against the door— he wasn’t going to fight, not if it was Harry.

But Harry hadn’t come to fight. Harry had stood there, in the yellow porch light, wearing the same clothes from the battle and with blood still matted in his hair, and called him his parent. 

(He can’t possibly mean that, I’m not, he’d thought, staring at Harry with his heart pounding in his chest; a voice that sounded very much like Dumbledore had gone your patronus would suggest otherwise, and then Harry had stepped across and hugged him—)

It feels like a dream, really. The idea that they both made it out; the idea that Harry knows everything and yet is still here, asleep on him like he’s not a Death Eater and the reason his parents are dead; the idea that Harry’s going to go to the Burrow and then come back, because apparently that’s what they’re doing now—

Like he’s mine, Snape thinks, staring down at Harry’s thin brown face. He blinks, swallows, his heart pounding in his chest like he’s run miles. 

Harry’s going to wake up, and he’ll make him breakfast, and he’ll come back from the Burrow and fall asleep on the sofa. He’ll change the wards so all three of them can get here, and then he’ll go to Bath and get the photos from the warded box and put them up on the walls, and buy Harry some clothes that haven’t been through a whole war. He’s going to come home to the Trio walking the fields, or cooking and laughing in the kitchen, like the Grangers and the Weasleys do, all here, all alive—

He lets out a long breath. Harry had said that both Lily and James’s patronuses had turned to fawns after Harry had been born. What does it say about them that after all the bullying and the betrayals and the lies, all of them had converged to a single point, their love the sort that mangled the way you held yourself?

He traces the scar again. He remembers thinking, when Dumbledore told him that the Dark Lord had given her a chance and Lily hadn’t taken it, that she had been a fool. How could one sniveling infant be worth her life?

(Except that infant is a man now, face thin from fighting a war, asleep on his leg like he deserves such trust; except that infant is a man who flies like a maniac and has love to give away in spades and is a survivalist but also smart and cunning and slick and brave. And he misses her, because of course he misses her, she’s his best friend— but also—)

It was the right deal, Lily, he thinks, as Harry shifts, and he knows because now he’d make the same one a thousand times over. No hesitation, no regret. 

He makes breakfast as Harry attempts to explain volo for the third or fourth time, before Severus tells him to stop, he’ll just talk to Hermione. There are still things they need to talk about— Dumbledore; his actions as Headmaster; what Harry wants to do now that it’s over— but everything feels a bit steadier now, even if it still seems like a scene from a dream.

Harry hesitates, for a long moment, before stepping forward to hug him before he goes. All the embraces are running together and he doesn’t know what number they’re on anymore, and he hopes he never remembers. 

And maybe he doesn’t deserve this, but at the end of the day he’s still a Slytherin, all the way down to the bones. If Harry’s willing to give it to him, he wants it, with all he has in him. He returns the hug, dense and grounding, and looks down the long corridor of the years to the future. 

_______________

The Outback is bright and hot and full of dust, and there is something transcendent and steadying about being able to see for miles after the year they’ve had. The place where her magic usually sits is hollow, vacant, like it was after bringing Ron back, but Hermione lies on the loveseat in the clinic as her parents pack, Crookshanks a loaf against her ribs, and finds she doesn’t mind. Though she loves her magic dearly, there’s a part of her that would be able to make peace with it never coming back, if it meant the boys got to live. 

She tells her parents everything, in bits and pieces, as they pack up their lives in Warburton and prepare to head back to Perth, and then back to Britain. Without the press of the war, chards of memories rear up without her consent. Sitting in the snowy woods, clutching a wand and watching her breath cloud as she worked out coefficients for volo. Bellatrix, dragging her upright at the manor, and how through the haze of pain the only compass had been the ring and her desire to be with the boys. The version of Voldemort that had risen out of the diadem for Draco, his face waxy and stretched, his eyes too red— you’ve betrayed everything your family has fought for, struggled for; you’re a worthless traitor— and how Draco had grit his teeth and brought the sword down anyway, like he’d always been theirs. The way in the memory, Harry had gone still and shaky at the sight of Number Four Privet Drive.

How volo had worked. She buries her head into the corner of the loveseat and sees again the way Harry had stood there and cast her spell without hesitation, as his only shield against the curse that couldn’t be blocked, like he trusted her that much, and—

And Harry had wanted to live more than Voldemort wanted to kill him, and so he had.

And after everything they’d been through with Snape this past year, he had been on their side all along. Hermione has a sneaking suspicion that once she’s less exhausted and her magic is back, she’ll have enough energy to be angry about it all, in the same way she’s already angry at Dumbledore— how difficult would it have been to just distribute information to people who might need it? Voldemort was a legilimens, blah blah blah— he was also an idiot who hadn’t exploited his connection with Harry at all and had completely written her and Ron off because they weren’t in some stupid Prophecy. Hermione’s pretty confident the three of them could have kept the secret of Snape’s true loyalties, and Harry being a fucking Horcrux just as well as they’d kept the secret of their quest.

She sits up, flops her head over on the couch. Crookshanks lets out a displeased meep about his displacement, but then comes right back, curling up on her lap. Her mum is at the clinic, seeing a last few patients before they leave tomorrow; her dad is packing the car. The whole timeline is fuzzy because of how much she’s been sleeping, and the time zones, but she thinks it’s been two days since the battle. Ron is still at the Burrow, she can feel from her ring, and Harry is at Lake District, and getting to them would be as easy as standing up, stepping through. 

They’re fine, we won, she thinks, burying a hand in Crookshanks’s fur. She’s never been hungover, but she’s been magically exhausted plenty of times, and there’s something about how she feels now that’s got to be a blend of the two. They’ve been running and fighting and surviving for so long that now her body doesn’t know what to do in the come-down. 

The desert light is like a furnace, and even with her eyes shut everything is still so bright. She’s done nothing but sleep and eat and explain over the past few days, and yet she’s still exhausted, and her brain is still so loud, like the inside of a tornado. Mundungus and Aberforth died in the fighting, she knows; who else? Who else were they unable to save, with all their skill and power and luck? 

Ron cast avada without even hesitating, to kill the Death Eater who would have probably killed Neville. She sees the blood on her hands in the snow, when he was bleeding out— when he bled out, because they’d all fucking died— and Voldemort’s mocking voice calling up to them about Harry, dying a coward’s death, her and Ron clutching each other, hoping with all they had in them—

Regulus, being dragged down into the depths of the lake by the inferni, unable to trust anyone. Dumbledore, unable to trust anyone. Snape, unable to trust anyone. Can she undo the blood-magic she did, to suspend the keys to their information backups in the ether, she wonders? Will it be worth the effort? 

What are they going to do with Voldemort’s body? And about about the Ministry of Magic, and all the rebuilding that needs to happen— it’s a pivotal era, really, a chance to slot in new legislation, but a misstep could put them back into a cycle of oppression and hatred—

She swallows. Crookshanks nudges at her hand, asking for pets, and she complies. 

Ron. Harry. Ron’s at the Burrow, which means that between Mrs. Weasley and Fleur and Bill, he’s eating very well. And Harry— well, if the summer after Sirius had died was any indication, Snape would cook and Harry would eat it. 

They’re fine, she tells herself again, running her finger over the ring, but also she can’t remember the last time they spent more than a few hours apart and it hurts. 

She watches her dad carry a suitcase out the door, humming as he does so; Hermione sees Voldemort falling to the ground stone-cold dead and thinks what the fuck are we supposed to do now?

Because since the beginning, they’ve been fighting for their lives, against some threat or another. Quirrellmort; Diary Riddle trying to release the basilisk; the dementors and Sirius (even if he hadn’t actually been a deranged mass murderer, he had done a damn good job of acting like one); the bloody Tournament—

The actual war. Which had always been theirs, regardless of people trying to keep them out of the Order. They were the ones to do the research; they were the ones who stepped up to teach defense; the ones to show up at the Ministry and fight; the ones to get Draco and Narcissa out. What good had the Order been, when they were out starving in the woods; what good had Dumbledore been, when they’d been developing a counter? 

(Everything’s been about the war, for seven years, and now it’s just over?)

(What the hell is she, Hermione Jean Granger, supposed to do with that?)

It’s a long drive back to Perth, through the heat and light and then the endless stars of the Outback, but her parents want to hear about volo in agonizing detail, so she pulls her notes from the foldspace and walks them through it. In the Perth apartment, she sees the pictures her parents brought across an ocean hanging on the wall, and thinks again about the house where Harry hadn’t been loved or wanted, and that part of her that could have been so, so good in Gryffindor twitches, longing to go burn it down. Ron and Ginny would help, surely. 

She looks out at the shining city out to the sea, as her parents pack what little they brought with them into suitcases and Socks leaps up onto the cat hammock stuck to the glass of the window. Her magic is still far off, and Harry is with Ron at the Burrow now. Her dad comes over to stand beside her, wraps his arm around her, kisses the top of her head. 

“We’re so proud of you, Hermy,” he whispers, and she has to shut her eyes. What a year they must have had, far off and unable to help, and yet they’d wanted to worry about her. 

“I have to go back,” she says, leaning into the embrace and raising her hand to wipe salt from her eyes.

“I know,” he say. “We should be back in Birmingham in a few days. We’ll see you then.”

She hugs him, hugs her mum, hugs him again. Crookshanks, indignant at the idea of her leaving again, keeps trying to climb up her leg, so eventually she just picks him up and decides to take him through the portkey with her. 

“I love you both,” she tells them, looking at them framed in the evening light of Perth: her mother with her round face; her father with his bony hands. “I’ll see you soon.” And this time, she means it.

It’s as simple as stepping through a door. The morning light is crystal clear, and Harry and Ron are bickering about who gets Ginny on their team— mate it’s not like you need a Seeker, come off it; well, I could just be chaser, and then Ginny goes maybe we should play all-out— and then she’s there, Susan unfolding herself from where she’d settled down on the grass with a shriek, and Neville throwing down his broom, and Fred and George are there, and Luna, and Viktor, and Quidditch is forgotten, and there’s only the morning sun, and the clatter of the Burrow, and Harry and Ron, here and whole and hers. 

Luna suggests they play three-teamed Quidditch, which Ginny latches onto like the maniac she is, and Hermione isn’t sure when she was last on a broom, but George digs out an old Shooting Star that’s got most of the spirit broken out of it. She and Luna play with Ginny, which is barely a handicap for her; Harry has Fred and George; Viktor has Ron and Neville, who’s not half-bad, now. Apparently Bill and Charlie and Percy and Mr. Weasley are at the Ministry, trying to sort out things; Mrs. Weasley is back at the house, trying to put it to right after they abandoned it, but Fleur comes out to sit with Susan.

Harry and Fred and George win, if that sort of thing matters at all. Viktor has grey in his hair now, and there’s a webbed burn down the side of Luna’s neck, and George is missing fingers on his left hand, but they’re here. They’re all here. When they troop inside for lunch, they pass a happy Crookshanks stalking a gnome, and Mrs. Weasley gives her a hug, and there her hand on the clock is, pointed toward home. Harry sits on one side of her, Ron on the other, and something about the future feels less urgent when they’re right here. They’ve got time, they’ll figure it out. 

“So Snape went okay?” she asks Harry in a low voice, when they’re out walking the fields after lunch. 

Harry ducks his head, but nods, and launches into a long story, about how Snape’s patronus had been him for ages, and Snape making him eat, and how mad Snape had been, about the Horcrux business, and how he’d modified the wards to let all three of them through. “He did finally call you my friends,” he says. “And also he’s calling me by my first name, which is really fucking weird.” Weird, maybe, but from the smile he can’t quite seem to keep off his face, Hermione figures he doesn’t mind at all. 

She tells them about her parents, about them coming back to the UK. Wonders if the raspberries in the back of the row house are growing. It’s May seventh now; there’s work to be done, she knows, but she wants to wait. Just a little bit longer, out here in the glades. Figure out how to breathe again.

They sleep curled up in the same bed, like they’re back in Grimmauld or the bolthole, and Hedwig arrives bright and early with a whole packet of letters, from Sue and Anthony (who are at Anthony’s house); from Ernie and Justin (who are at Justin’s); from Theo and Daphne (who are with the Creevys, and seeing Theo sign his letter love Theo without any code or cipher makes Hermione feel like the entire war was worth it.) Mrs. Weasley makes an entire skillet of rashers just for Hedwig, and she eats them all. 

After breakfast, Harry slips off to go see Snape for what Hermione dearly hopes is second breakfast, Fleur grabs Ron for a chess match, and Hermione finds herself cornered by Ginny and Susan, who beckon her out the house, and off the property, walking the track towards town.

“Where are we going?” she asks. 

“Ottery,” says Ginny. She’s wearing an Oasis shirt that absolutely used to be Hermione’s, and her flying boots, and she’s still got a wand on each wrist.

“Muggle chemist,” elaborates Susan, who’s fluffy blonde hair is pulled back in a neat braid, and the hex damage to her arm is healing nicely. Hermione feels a sudden rush of longing for them, even though they’re right here; missing the year they didn’t get, maybe, where Ginny could have won another Quidditch Cup and they would have stayed up late talking politics and crushes and British League. 

“Why?” asks Hermione. The sunlight sparkles on the early morning dew, and the swallows are flying high above them in the clear blue sky.

“Well,” says Susan, and there’s a tone to her voice, a little smug, a little playful, mostly just exuberantly Susan, “Fleur told me yesterday that she’s three months late.” Of course Fleur would tell that to Susan, because that’s the kind of thing Hermione would tell Susan— it’s Susan. “And she thinks it’s just stress, but—“

“Holy shit,” says Hermione, turning to Susan and Ginny. “You think?”

Ginny shrugs; she’s trying and failing to keep a grin off her face. “I mean, why not?”

They walk the track to the village, like they’re just three teenage kids, back from school early. In the back aisle at the chemist’s, she extracts a tenner from the foldspace of her watch and they buy the pregnancy test, the three of them standing there, fresh off a war. Susan takes her hand on the walk back, and Ginny’s hair catches the light. 

There’s so much to do. There will always be so much to do. But walking back to the Burrow with a pregnancy test, two women she’d consider sisters beside her, the war over, it feels like it can wait. 

They have years and years. Years and years. Hermione hums a melody from “Stand By Me” and opens her heart to the future.

_______________

A week after the battle, Molly wakes from a vivid nightmare, and it takes her a long moment to get her bearings, trying to ground herself on Arthur’s snores. It hadn’t even been about the battle, but about the aftermath— about the overgrown graveyard outside the ruins of what had once been the Weasley Estate, where they’d buried Muriel just a few days ago. Except instead of just one gaping slot in the chalky soil, there had been ten, and she’d walked along their rims with the grass swaying, staring down at her children’s cold dead forms.

She knows they’re fine. She knows. But she still has to slide out of bed and pad down to the kitchen at five am, just to look at the clock and see it for herself: all of the hands still here. 

Percy’s hand, which is still pointed towards work, swings sharply around to traveling while she’s watching, and then the back door is swinging open as it settles on home. He stands in the soft light from the kitchen blinking for a moment, as the kettle begins to whistle. “Mum?”

“Nightmare,” she says, summoning an additional mug. “Do you want some?”

“Please,” he says, shrugging off his satchel and curling up on one of the barstools with his head in the hands. Up close, it’s clear how thin he is, like most of her family seems to be— she and Fleur have made it their mission over the past week to make dense, filling meals. (And given what she saw of Severus in the final battle, he too could use some— she’ll have to do her best to get him over here.) 

Arthur and her three oldest have been working around the clock for the past week, struggling to sort out the aftermath of You— of Voldemort’s, he’s dead, she might as well start saying it— death (the twins wouldn’t be caught dead at the Ministry, and Merlin knows the Trio and Ginny could do with some sleep). Percy, having spent the two years as undersecretary to the Minister, is one of their best resources, and he hasn’t gotten home before three am the whole week. She sets the mug before him and rounds the counter to give him a hug; he folds into it. 

“Ted settling in as Interim Minister?” she asks, stepping back from the embrace after a long moment. Percy blows on his tea and shrugs. 

“He swears he’s only doing it until we can call a Wizengmont session with no confirmed Death Eaters in it, and then he’ll put in the no-confidence vote himself,” he says. “But like Lucy said, that’s sort of exactly the attitude you want in an interim Minister.” 

Molly nods, thinking about Ted Tonks, who is an even-keeled muggleborn who’d never want power; he’d never been in the Order, which apparently was the whole point. Somehow, the committee to establish the new government consists of four Weasleys, Lucy and Sue Li, Andromeda and Ted Tonks, and Ernie MacMillian and Anthony Goldstien and Daphne Greenglass. But maybe it makes sense— who was left to keep fighting, but her family and a bunch of school children? 

“We’re getting there,” says Percy, rubbing at his face. “Hermione said she would come in with us tomorrow.” Molly purses her lips at that— what Hermione wants, Hermione usually gets, being the force of nature she is, but personally she thinks that girl needs about four more days of sleep and a lot more solid meals in her, and maybe a look-over by a professional healer, considering Bellatrix had carved a slur into her arm (at least that bitch was stone-cold dead, how dare she do that to her daughter). Percy yawns. “And Kingsley’s working on getting the DLME reconstituted so we can go after some of the lingering Death Eaters.”
“Go lie down, dear,” she says. “Just for a few hours. You’ll be no help if you’re exhausted.”

Percy rubs at his eyes and nods, and then she gets another hug, before he staggers out of the kitchen, up to the room he’s sharing with Charlie and Neville for the time being (Viktor had gone back to his flat in Ipswich yesterday, but Molly had made him promise to come around for dinners). She feels the embrace settle in her chest like a stone, and then turns around and looks at the clock again, feeling tears prick at the corners of her eyes. George is missing fingers, Fred has some pretty severe curse damage, and Harry and Hermione and Ron all died, but somehow they’d all made it through. Except for Muriel, but given that the hundred-and-three year-old had killed a few Death Eaters before dying in the final fight, it feels manageable somehow. 

She’s just pulling out the flour and the sugar— if she’s up, she might as well cook— when a bleary-eyed Ron stumbles down the stairs, stopping in the light to blink at her. “Alright, dearie?” she asks. 

He hauls himself up onto the barstool Percy had vacated and puts his head in his hands. “Nightmare,” he says horsely. Molly purses her lips— she’d heard enough from Bill and Fleur about how when the Trio had stayed with them, they’d barely slept the night through, always one of them up with something— and pours him a cuppa, which his takes gratefully. 

In the lacuna of silence, which he nurses the tea and she begins to kneed bread without magic, she studies him, just like she’s studied the Trio this whole week. All three of them are thin, and twitchy, and somehow more and less inseparable than they used to be. She’s still trying to wrap her mind around the idea that somehow Hermione poured enough magic into the rings so that they could just come back, even from— from death. 

She shuts her eyes, trying to shake the dregs of her nightmare— they’re fine, they’re all under her roof again. But the idea that she could have lost them all— that she did loose them all, even if only for a few minutes— has gotten down into her chest, grown roots. 

“It was Hermione,” says Ron quietly, after a long silence. “Bleeding out on the beach.” Molly folds the dough carefully, trying not to make a sound, and looks up at him— her clever, brilliant, powerful son, who won them the war and made it back. “I—“ He rubs at his face. “I’ve been dreaming about it for years, mum.” He raises his eyes to her, and she can see they’re red. “Hermione bleeding out on a beach, and Harry dead in the woods, and it all came true and now I’m still dreaming about it—“

She rounds the kitchen and takes him in her arms, vanishing the flour from her hands; he melts into the embrace, his shoulders shaking. She holds him even as her jumper grows damp. 

“It was just us, mum,” he gasps out, clutching at her, and he’s fought a whole war and yet she remembers when he was six or seven, how when he scraped his knee he screwed up his face around the family, but would always start crying once he was on the edge of the bathtub and she was the only witness. “Just— just running and searching and we were always so hungry and I— it was never enough. I was never enough.”

“Ron,” she says, as he sobs into her shoulder, her hand cradling the back of his head. “You were, dear. You were enough. You won.” She takes a deep breath, and then another, as in the distance the light turns a watery purple. She thinks about the rings, and how the Trio moves around each other, and that very first letter Ron had written her from Hogwarts, which had been so much about them he almost forgot to mention which House he’d been sorted into. Her heart swells with pride and awe for her son, her sixth son who found two kids on a train and made them his, and doesn’t even seem to understand the alchemy he’s worked. “Hermione and Harry wouldn’t have made it back without you.”

His grip tightens, and they stay there for a long time, him sobbing salt and snot on her jumper and the dawn laying fingers of light across the landscape. After all of this, it really is over, isn’t it— all her children back under her roof, if only for a little while, and Voldemort stone-cold dead, and a chance to build any kind of future they want. 

He breaks apart for her eventually, rubbing at his face. She rewarms his tea with a flick of her wand and goes back to kneading. “I wrote you letters, while we were out there,” he says, after a long moment; she jerks her eyes back up to him, where he’s sitting with his hands curled around the mug. “Couldn’t send ‘em, of course, so I burned them, but— dunno. Guess it felt weird that you didn’t know.” 

It takes all that she has not to burst into tears. “I would have read them,” she says, feeling so small and so helpless before the love her son has, like an ocean. 

“I know,” he says, as if it’s easy, and he sits there until the tea is finished, and first Hermione, and then Harry slip down to join him, a line of three in her kitchen, like it should be. 

And is this what a family looks like? Arthur, waking early before slipping off to the Ministry, trailed by Bill (who’s somehow been made co-head of the newly reformed Auror office, second to Kingsley), and Charlie (who’s been roped into rebuilding the Department of International Magical Cooperation), but the twins come down with shared smug grins— dispelled Perce’s alarm charm— and Molly can’t be mad, about how their care is welling up through the floorboards. Susan comes down and sits next to Ron, and Ginny comes down and sits next to Harry, and Hermione’s produced a tome from nowhere and is taking notes, mug of tea her elbow. Neville’s still here; a little awkward and a little shy and very polite, with scars on his face and festering hex damage and he, like Susan, is alone in the world now but he can be hers, if he lets her. 

It’s the beginning of the end, Molly knows. The twins will peal off back to their apartment over their shop, sell products to the next generation of Hogwarts students, who will surely need something to distract them in that haunted house. Charlie’s itching to get back to Romania; Bill and Fleur will want to be back at Shell Cottage; she hasn’t seen Percy’s flat in London yet, but surely it’s immaculate. Ron and Hermione and Harry might stick around a while yet, splitting their time between the Granger’s row home in Birmingham and maybe even wherever Snape is hiding from the fallout of the war, but eventually they’ll go, get a flat together. And even Ginny won’t stay— Molly personally thinks there’s no way in hell she’ll go back to Hogwarts next year, not with the war and the way she flies. Once the world gets going again, she’ll have offers for workouts from the clubs, and that will be that. An empty house. 

But not a haunted one. The sort of place they could turn up to at any time, lay out on the couch, get a hunk of bread and jam and fall asleep to the wireless on the carpet. As her family tucks into their breakfast, all elbows and the red hair balanced out, she has visions of the future— Susan and Ginny coming in the door, arguing about Quidditch; Charlie turning up unexpectedly for New Years; Fred and George bringing home dates. Harry making himself a sandwich, his shoulders relaxed; Hermione asleep on the sofa with a book on her chest. 

And when Fleur pulls her aside after breakfast, and tells her the news in the clotted morning sunlight on the back porch, that future is suddenly so much larger— tiny children on Little League brooms; teaching grandchildren to kneed bread and knit but not to fight, never to fight, because they ended it— she hugs her daughter tight and doesn’t try to hold back the tears. 

They made it. And now, there’s everything else. 

_______________

(Later, the Ministry of Magic will try to give Ron and Hermione and Harry all Orders of Merlin, and they’ll all say no, though for different reasons. Hermione couldn’t care less, about a medal and a title when she still wants to take the Ministry apart and put it back together; Harry didn’t save the world for them and doesn’t want to pretend he did. Ron, though, will think about the Mirror first year, and what he thinks he would have seen if he’d stood there alone. He’ll think about the shade from the locket and what it had told him, and how the Hat had gone Hufflepuff will be enough of a shift, and write the letter declining it quickly, before he can change his mind. And he doesn’t regret it, because he doesn’t get the chance, because every time someone thanks Harry for being the Chosen One, or Hermione for inventing volo, both of them will make it about him, as if somehow all along he’d been some linch-pin.)

(Later, the Grangers will take the Prophet again, and clip the articles about their children, all three of them, put them up in frames in their hallways. Cindy will never stop feeling sick at the sight of the slur carved into her daughter’s forearm, just like she’ll always detest the scar cut into Ron’s face and how Harry’s lightning bolt never quite heals correctly. But they’re here, and alive, eating raspberries in the back-garden at twenty-three with war slightly lighter on their shoulders, and she’s no witch, never will be, but the love in her chest is a spell all its own.)

(Later, Harry will have almost too many houses to call his own: an old industrial loft in London; the Burrow, with the tall grass and the comfortable sofas; the row house in Birmingham, where Hermione’s parents never take the sign with his name off the door. But on the bad nights, when he finds himself twitchy and jumpy, ready to hex shadows; after raids gone bad that leave him with blood on his hands; after weird encounters with people who keep calling him the Chosen One, it’s always Lake District where he ends up, walking down from the ward boundary in the mist. Behind Snape’s empire of wards, he can sleep, and then they’ll be breakfast, Snape asking him careful questions until the truth is laid out on the table, and he feels safe again. The Before is a distant nightmare, and he’s wanted in too many kitchens to count.)

(Later, Snape will go out to the grave in Godric’s Hollow for the first time, collar turned up and flowers in his shaking hands, and crouch in the tall grass and try to explain, how he didn’t mean to fuck it up, and also thank you, and also here I am, I’m not you but I promise I’ll try to do right by him. He will go to Christmases, and weddings, and the birthday parties of children with his name, and yet there is a part of him that is always still stunned when he summons his patronus and it is the yearling with a single antler bud. But he’s a Slytherin, and this is a story about survival, and also a story about the reasons why survival is worth it, and so he knocks back the coffee and rubs at the scar the Mark left behind and circles thing in Owl Order catalogs grandchildren might like.)

(Later, they’ll always ask her to demonstrate volo— for NEWT-level defense courses; for the Auror corp; for special studies on advanced magic— and Hermione will shut her eyes and think about home. Home, which is the Birmingham row house, and the Burrow, and the little flat where Susan dented the ceiling with a champagne cork and Millie brought them maps to tack to the walls and Ginny was always tracking in mud from flooing over straight after Quidditch. Home, which is Ron and Harry. What are you working on next, they’ll ask her, at conferences and presentations and when she’s in some back room at the Auror office trying to help with wards, and there are always thousands of possibilities, and she’ll just grin. There won’t be time to get to them all, she knows, even at twenty-five and thirty, but the fact that they have time at all is a miracle she doesn’t take lightly.)

(Later, Molly will knit little baby booties and then scarves and then the sweaters for the next generation, which will come in all colors. There are Gryffindors, because of course there are Gryffindors, but there are also bubbly, delightful Hufflepuffs, and curious, nerdy Ravenclaws, and slick, charismatic Slytherins. But there are no martyrs in the bunch; no loyalists who’d take a jet of AK without even hesitating; no obsessives who pull all-nighters just to win a war. And certainly no survivalists, coming into her house after a childhood where no one fed them or held them. Look, what a world we’ve made, Molly will think, as she packs up the sweaters, as she receives the letters, and there are no deaths, and no rotating DADA professors, and no child soldiers. Look at it.)

(And years and years later, when he’s been teaching at Hogwarts for years, Harry will lean against the frame of the back door of the Burrow and watch the kids bicker in midair while his crew bickers behind him— Sue and Hermione about sourcing for a paper they’re putting together; Ginny and Susan and Ron about Quidditch; Theo and Luna about the limits of magical theory— while even farther back, Mrs. Weasley and Snape have their long-standing argument about if he’s going to stay for dinner (he is). Neville comes up to stand next to him, puts his forearm up on his shoulder like another brother, and he slumps slightly under it, lets the safety of it ground him. His scar hasn’t hurt in years.)

(He doesn’t know much, but he does know that when he cast volo all those years ago, this was everything he wanted, and now, miracle of miracles, it’s all here.)

Chapter Text

Pomona stands against the wall of the Great Hall, heart in her throat, as the Trio faces down the Dark Lord. Ron and Hermione are on either side of a miraculously-alive Harry— thin, and with blood in his hair and glasses shattered, and is that a different wand— but still Harry, in all the ways that matter. An exhausted Minerva is on one side of her; Filius, bleeding from several ancient scars that have reopened, is on the other.

Harry talks about Horcruxes, and quests, which Pomona won’t pretend to know anything of, but her heart swells when he tells the Dark Lord Ron and Hermione’s names, because yes, he should know why he’s loosing this war. They trade jabs, and Pomona keeps her wand raised— Harry might have said this was their fight, but all the need for an avada for that bastard was formed the day he killed Cedric just for standing there. 

They’re talking about wands now— you thought killing Snape, who killed Dumbledore, would win you the Elder Wand, right? asks Harry, and Pomona feels everything in her chest turn to ice. At her side, Minerva pales, and Flitwick lets out a sharp gasp. He can’t be dead— not after everything— 

Snape is dead, says the Dark Lord, cold and final, and Minerva grabs for her free hand, the grip tight enough to bruise. Whatever Severus has been to them this year, to come all this way and loose him now—

When you leave someone to bleed out, it leaves a lot of room for us to come in and save him, says Harry, and she feels Minerva sag at her shoulder; Filius lets out a sigh of relief. The Dark Lord seems shaken by that, but moves on quickly— he’s always been my best, most loyal servant, a statement Harry matches with a triumphant grin.

Snape isn’t yours, Harry says, chin high, unyielding, and Pomona thinks that right now he doesn’t looking like either of his parents, but a lot like Severus himself. He’s mine. 

It’s Minerva who lets out a small gasp this time, and Pomona feels a flush of hope bloom within her chest. Somewhere in the battle, did he have a chance to tell him? She manages to tear her eyes away from Harry for a moment, and like instinct, she finds the man himself: leaning against the far wall like a shadow, clearly in pain, but alive. 

His patronus is a yearling deer with just one antler, says Harry, and Filius squeaks and Minerva chokes on something that might be a sob and she’s just staring at him, across the hall, as his impassive Severus Snape, loving nothing and no one face cracks open, and maybe the civilians wouldn’t be able to parse it, but she’s not a civilian, hasn’t been for years now: it’s relief, and unbelieving joy. It’s me, says Harry. And Snape gave me his wand. 

It can only go one way: the avada, and a spell she’s never heard before from Harry, and then the hall fills with golden light, and the dead. 

Her jaw drops open. Standing just a step in front of Minerva is James Potter, with his messy hair and thin shoulders; a few feet in front of Filius is Dorcas Meadows, who was one of his mentees; in front of her is Bertha Jorkins, who used to come down to the greenhouses to take tea and disappeared in Albania all those years ago. Scattered around the hall, illuminated in gold, she sees them all— Cedric and Caradoc; Penelope and Pius; Mundungus and Warrington and Sirius. In front of Severus, Lily and Regulus; in front of Neville, his grandmother.

Everyone he’s killed, Pomona realizes, her breath catching. Tell me their names! yells Harry, where he stands at the front of it all, flanked by Ron and Hermione and also golden versions of the three of them. 

And even if given all the time in the world, the Dark Lord could never hope to do that, Pomona knows, with the ruthless certainty of a Hufflepuff. The dead open their hands, and the avada Voldemort intended for Harry hits him right in the chest. 

And then it’s all over.

The hall is silent, for one long, agonizing moment, and then erupts into cheers, the whole hall seeming to converge towards Harry. 

Pomona has eyes for only one man, who is no longer the Headmaster and no longer playing games and is simply her friend. She shakes Minerva’s hand from hers and moves, her steps certain and unshakable.

A few flights down in the dungeons, she catches up to him. His hand on the wall is leaving blood, and he has no wand in hand, but she sees him still as he hears footsteps. “It’s me, Severus. It’s alright.” His shoulders slump slightly, and she comes around so they’re face to face. 

He’s looked like shit this whole school year— obviously he hasn’t been eating, and being at the Dark Lord’s beck and call for torture hasn’t done him any favors— but he looks worse now. There’s blood slicked all down the side of his neck and throat, barely clotted; his face is ghostly pale; and he’s shaking. Her hands come up around his shoulders instinctively. “It’s okay,” she says. “You’re on our side. You’ve always been on our side.”

He crumples into her chest— his hair is matted with blood, and she can feel his disconcerting thinness— and she holds him. “It’s alright,” she whispers, and it’s as much for herself as it is for him. “He’s dead. It’s over.”

The castle, which seemed to come alive mid-battle, seems to understand what they need, letting them into Slughorn’s office and past the farces of wards on his potions cabinets. She digs until she finds brews labeled in Severus’s careful hand, has him drink until he can speak again.

He’s too weak to walk down to the ward boundary, but she hands him her wand to craft a portkey; he takes it with a shaking hand, looking at her hesitantly. “Come on, Severus,” she says softly, as they stand in the office that used to be his. “You really thought you were fooling us? If you were a real Death Eater, you would have killed us and hunted Harry down yourself.” 

Severus swallows. “I— I don’t— Minerva—“

“Minerva was standing there about to cry when the Dark Lord said he’d killed you,” says Pomona bluntly, and Severus blinks, and then blinks again. She glances around the office; it’s clear Slughorn, ever the coward, left in a hurry. On the desk, she sees what he left behind— what the castle didn’t let him leave with. She remembers all too vividly the night Severus had handed it over, trusting her to protect his own. When she slides it back on his bloody hand, it shrinks to fit. “You’re ours.”

He goes still, as if Stunned, his dark eyes darting up her face and then back down to the ring. “I— Why?” he rasps.

After the year they’ve had, she has no subtly left in her. “Because we love you,” she says, stepping forward and pulling him into a proper hug, and if her shoulder grows damp, they can both pretend it’s blood not tears. 

When he’s pulled back, wiped at his face, he reaches out to the portkey. Pauses with his hand outstretched, and then screws up his face, draws a long breath. “I. I love you too.” Then, being the bastard he is, he darts out his hand and vanishes, before she has another chance to hug him. 

It takes her the whole walk back up to the Great Hall to remember how to breathe again, everything her chest some maw of relief and exasperation and complete manic joy. She finds Minerva and Filius on instinct, where they stand in the morning light, and conveys the key points to them— he’s alive, I got him some potions, sent him home. Minerva slumps, the tension leaving her shoulders; Filius gets out a sigh of relief. Pomona feels the same, as she watches the Union move the body into a side closet off the Hall, to be dealt with later. Somehow, it’s over, and they’ve got the fourth member of their party back. For a long moment, the three of them just stand there, watching the light fall through the windows of the Great Hall and reveling in the fact that they’re alive. 

They divide and conquer, then. Minerva takes care of the survivors; Filius handles the dead, and she goes down to the Chamber of Secrets, the parseltongue words Millie taught her still unfamiliar on her tongue, and steps around mud and flagstone until she reaches the door Theo and Sue tunneled through the wards. She knocks, stands back, and is met with her sixth-year Prefect Jane Markov’s wand aimed at her chest. Flanking her are Hadrian and Ursula, the sixth-year Prefects from Slytherin.

“Prove you’re Professor Sprout,” says Jane, her hand shaking slightly.

She knows enough about the three of them to prove it— stories from detentions, career advising, Herbology essays, dating histories. None of it is privileged information, exactly, but it’s also the sort of tedious minutia none of the Death Eaters— save Severus, but he doesn’t exactly count— would ever bother with. Eventually, they lower their wands, beckon her through.

On the other side is Millie’s parents’s house in central France, which they keep for “tax purposes.” The dawn light is soft, and there are sheets over all the furniture, and everywhere there are children— small second-years asleep on the legs of patient fifth-years; nervous third-years whispering to each other; the seventh-years who didn’t stay to fight on their feet, wards hanging heavy in the air. Some two hundred and fifty souls, alive to see another sunrise. Everyone turns to look at her as she steps through, their attention rapt. 

“It’s over,” she says, and maybe if she says it enough she’ll believe it. “He’s dead. We won.”

The house erupts into cheers— the tiny first-years who have never known Hogwarts apart from war; the seventh-years who Susan made leave before they got hurt in the fighting; the stoic fourth-years, the sixth-years who have done their best to have their fair share of making out in stairwells, war be damned; the children of the Order and the children of the Death Eaters— all of them are celebrating. By the end, very few of them thought this was about blood purity, or the new order of the world; for them, it’s been nothing but threats of crucio, and the Carrows hurting anyone who moved, and newspaper articles about Undesirable Number One, as if he was not a half-blooded Slytherin who loved people from every house and would have fought tooth and nail for all of them. 

Pomona knows there are dead laid out in the hall upstairs, on the lawn in the dew. Some of them, she knows, are the parents of children here; some of the dead are children she taught, a lifetime ago. But standing in the doorway, she sees alive children— muggleborns who’s papers Ernie faked so they could be here; children of Death Eaters who the Dark Lord wanted and didn’t get; tiny Gryffindor first-years and slick-talking Slytherin fifth-years and intelligent Ravenclaw second-years and her badgers: loyalists, the lot of them. 

The dead are laid out upstairs but this is the hot core of the future. This is who she would have died on her feet to protect, so that the Dark Lord could not hurt them anymore than he already has, and her heart swells at the sight of them, until she’s blinking away tears on the threshold.

She’s been awake for twenty-four hours, and the end is nowhere in sight. With the help of the Prefects, she gets the students back up to their common rooms, through hallways free of blood (the Union and Flich and Filius have been fighting through the night too, but all of them stepped up to the plate anyway), to pack and wait for the Hogwarts Express, which Minerva has arranged to leave for Kings Cross after lunch. While Filius sorts out the dead, and Minerva handles the parents and the politics, she goesHouse-to-House, dorm-to-dorm, trying to make sure all of their students have places to go. 

The doors all open to her touch, like the castle knows. In Slytherin, Hadrian and Ursula and an exhausted Theodore Nott step up to fill in for Severus, point out the kids who always stay over the holidays, who never talk about home, and all she can think is Dark House how? In Gryffindor, a Colin Creevy who absolutely shouldn’t have come back for the battle is holding both Dennis and Astoria; in Ravenclaw, Lisa Turpin and Terry Boot are comforting their house in the way only nerds can: with discussions about the sentience of Hogwarts. And then there her Hufflepuffs are: Hannah clearly exhausted but sitting on the floor with a small cluster of first-years anyway, Justin asleep on her leg; Megan Jones comforting a sobbing third-year. All alive, and so many of them getting up just to hug her. 

The train leaves at two pm. Between the three of them and the rest of the faculty— Irma is unscathed, as are her books; Sybil killed at least two Death Eaters by cracking their skulls with crystal balls and seems delighted about it; Aurora and Bathsheba spent most of the battle helping shore up the wards and protect the injured; Hagrid is still trying to make sure no spiders are anywhere near the castle, and from what Pomona saw of the dead Death Eaters, there were a lot of them with bullet holes (Merlin, she loves Argus)— they get the students on the train, and the fighters out of the Great Hall, and then stand on the platform until the smoke has lazed off into the spring air. 

“Anyone want a drink?” asks Minerva. Her cloak is singed through in several places, and Pomona loves her so sharply and suddenly it’s hard to breathe for a moment.

“We’ll meet you up there,” says Filius. “Pomona, there’s something you need to see.”

The bodies of the enemy are laid out in a little-used courtyard on the eastern side of the castle, under sheets that reek of Filius’s magic, like musty parchment and spring water. Exhaustion is flocking like sparrows behind her temples, and Filius walks with precise steps through the aisles— how many of these dead are children they taught— and it’s only when he’s kneeling to pull the sheet away from the face that it clicks why he’s brought her out here. 

Her face is older, with wrinkles that weren’t there when she’d taken off the ring, and certainly weren’t there when they’d first kissed behind the bar in Glasgow. Even all these years later, she can still feel the hungry glee in Marsha’s lips, her hands tight in her hair, and Merlin, it had been exhilarating to be wanted that much. Still is. 

She kneels to the flagstone, taking her in: the salt-and-pepper curls; the scar underneath her right eye that she hadn’t had before. Filius’s hand falls on her shoulder; “Avada, I think,” he says softly. “She wouldn’t have felt anything.”

There is a part to Pomona, which might have played well in Slytherin but also might just be so deeply Hufflepuff it’s terrifying to behold, that wishes it hadn’t been quick. Or hopes the avada had been hers, the need like a forest. Despite the divorce and the hurt and the manic letters, Pomona had hoped there had been a spark of love left between them— if not a marital sort, at least enough for a debt— that would have had her unable to march on the place she loved most in the world. 

She flicks back the sheet and then roughly pulls up the sleeve of the left arm. She’s seen Severus’s enough to know what she’s looking for. 

It’s empty, as smooth and freckled as it was in the days it was Pomona’s to kiss. Just ordinary evil, then. She can’t tell if that makes her feel better or worse. 

Filius’s hand is an anchor on her shoulder. “Do you want a moment?” he asks. 

She shakes her head and rises to her feet; above them the battlements, still smoking slightly, but indomitable against the skyline all the same. “I want a drink.”

Filius flicks his hand to move the sheet back over Marsha’s body, and Pomona turns away, and they walk back down the aisles to the castle threshold. Pomona thinks about the honeymoon, when they’d trekked across Peru; thinks about their warm house in Hogsmeade; thinks about the way the sunbeams would laze across her shoulder blade.

Thinks about the children looking up from her when she’d crossed over into the annex of the safe-house, in the aftermath. About how Severus had said it back; about Filius’s hand on her shoulder; about Minerva waiting with a bottle of top-shelf scotch because if there ever was a time, this was it. 

The only ring on her hand is the Hufflepuff one, and maybe grief and regret will come later, but for now, she just accepts the tumbler from Minerva, sits next to Filius on the settee, and feels only the clean, singular emotion of peace. 

______________

“That would be a singularly foolish choice,” says Percy, pushing his way into the circle. The battle has been over for all of an hour, just long enough for the wounded to be treated and sheets to be laid over the dead, though personally Percy thinks he’ll be having nightmares of Penelope’s cold face for the rest of his life. He doesn’t know how she died, or who killed her, and probably never will know, but it still feels like somehow it’s his fault. 

Penny’s dead, and Pius is dead, and Great-Aunt Muriel is dead, and so is Alicia Spinnet, who was in his year in Gryffindor and he used to tutor in potions. And You-Know-Who, and Bellatrix, and probably most of the other Death Eaters, but somehow it feels hollow. Of course people were going to die, it was a war, but—

He’s sitting at one of the tables in the Great Hall that’s been pushed against the wall, his mum on one side and Ginny asleep on his shoulder, her forehead pressed into his arm. On his mum’s other side, his dad has turned around on the bench to discuss politics in low tones with the core of the Order: Kingsley and McGonagall and Andromeda Tonks. He’s exhausted on a level too deep to put a name too, really, but he can’t help but listen— sorting out logistics to get the students home; notifications of the families of the dead; hunting down the Death Eaters who’ve fled; an interim Minster of Magic—

“I suppose you’re as good as anyone, Kingsley,” says McGonagall, and Percy might have blood dried in his hair and grief weighing heavily on his chest, but he won’t let that stand. He untangles himself gently from Ginny— Neville is on her other side, with the Sword of Gryffindor on the table, and he gently shifts her weight to his shoulder— and then draws himself to his feet, steps into the circle, his words like a dagger. 

“Kingsley, you’ve been among the Most Wanted for the last six months, and unlike Harry, which was obviously all the Dark Lord’s obsession, we have a great deal of evidence that you’ve been committing war crimes.” Kingsley swallows; his dad pales; Andromeda’s face twitches, and McGonagall tries and fails to hide a shudder. Percy’s disjointed mind wonders briefly what Dumbledore would have done, if he’d lived through all this and was standing here, as they tried to figure out how to form a government; Percy has a feeling he would have taken it completely in stride. He was, after all, just that Gryffindor.

But Percy isn’t Gryffindor like that, never was. There had been a moment, sitting on the stool at eleven, when the Hat had gone Slytherin could make you great, you know— and how you want that! where he’d thought about the green and silver, even if no one in his family had ever gone that way before. 

(And after everything, he knows the Hat had been right. He could have been a Slytherin, ambitious and exacting and amoral when he needed to be, working inside the rules to get what he wanted. What does it matter, really, except that here he is, brave and ambitious in the same breath, getting to his feet to change the world?)

“We need someone without ties to the Order, who has no ambitions of power, and cannot possibly be accused of being a Death Eater,” says Percy. “All they have to do is act as a figurehead who goes and talks with the reporters from the Prophet twice a day until we can organize a general election and get the Wizengmont back in session with no seats occupied by known Death Eaters.”

McGonagall is just staring at him, and Kingsley still looks a bit off-kilter about the war crimes line, but his dad rests his hand on his shoulder for a brief moment. “I can second that,” says his dad quietly. “Obviously by the end, Fudge was a power-hungry shadow of who he’d been at the start, but I think we lucked out getting him over Crouch.” A moment of silence, in the noisy, exhausted exuberance after the battle is over, and Percy revels in the warmth of his dad taking his side.

“I don’t want to be Minister,” Kingsley says, suddenly. He’s looking down at his hands, which have blood underneath the nails. “I— I want in on the rebuilding, I’ll run the Auror Office, or DLME, but I— Percy’s right.” In the dawn light, his bald head is shining, and the lingering trace of stubble on his chin are tinged with grey. “I did what I did and I’ll own that, but that can’t be how we operate, moving forward. Not if we want to build anything different.”

Percy lets out a long breath. Andromeda twists her face slightly. “What about Ted?” she asks, after a long moment. “He’s a muggleborn, he’s spent the whole war doing research or babysitting, and if that man has any ambitions of power, I’ll nip it in the bud.”

“Wouldn’t he hate it?” McGonagall asks.

“That’s exactly what we need,” says Percy. “Someone who hates it enough to forget about the power behind the office.”

Within the half hour, they’re at the Ministry. Andromeda works over a quick transfiguration of Ted’s lounge wear to official looking robes, black with just a trace of yellow; his dad is holding the baby and Kingsley is a shadow in the eves. McGonagall came along for tactical support, but the Ministry is abandoned, and they find the bullpens up by the Minister’s office just the same as when Percy left it last night (a wave of exhaustion hits him at just the thought of how long he’s been awake, followed by grief— if he’d left Pius under the imperius, would he have survived the battle?)

“So how exactly does this work?” asks Ted, as he looks around the Minister’s office. “We just stand here and declare a coup?”

“Pretty much,” says Andromeda, even as Percy starts opening drawers, and McGonagall, though clearly exhausted, starts casting wards around the heart of the Ministry. 

“We control the information, we control the Ministry,” says Percy. “And then you’ll go out and talk to the press about the end of the war.”

“And how exactly am I supposed to do that, considering I wasn’t even there?” asks Ted. 

“Minerva will introduce you,” says Andromeda, without hesitation. “Percy, what on earth are you doing?”

He yanks open one final drawer and the ring, which must have appeared back here after Pius died, comes sliding down to the front. “This will help,” he says, pulling the Minister’s signet ring from the drawer and handing it to Ted. “It will key you into the wards, give you control of the building.” He dumps the ring into Ted’s hand; Ted stares at it for a long moment.

“You promise you’ll get me out of this shit as soon as you can?” he says. His hair is still ruffled from sleep. Across the room, his dad has the baby tucked in the crook of his arm and is using the other to heal Andromeda’s linger wounds, and just looking at him, here and alive, almost brings Percy to his knees with relief.

“Don’t worry, dear,” says Andromeda; despite the fighting, there’s a glimmer of humor in her gaze. “We need you way too much at the house to lose you to the Ministry.”

Percy’s exhaustion is a living thing, but there’s no time to bow before it, not yet. He breaks the lock on the desk that used to belong to Rudolph Underhill, who was a nasty, obnoxious Dark Lord fanatic and drinks one of his pepper-up potions, and briefs Ted on key talking points for the press conference. 

They’re met, in the foyer of the Minster’s offices, by four of Ron’s friends: Daphne Greenglass, who’s hair is matted with blood and mud, though her silver eyes gleam; Ernie MacMillian, with a blackening eye and an undone Hufflepuff tie; Sue Li, who has a split lip and reopened scars; and Anthony Goldstien, who’s eyes are bloodshot and is clutching a dossier to his chest. “Don’t you dare start rebuilding the government without us,” says Sue.

“How did you even get here, Miss Li?” asks McGonagall. 

“Come-and-Go Room,” says Sue, which Percy has never heard of, but must be powerful, if it can get them past McGonagall’s wards. “My mum should be here soon. If you want a prosecutor to help fix up the DLME.”

Maybe it’s a testament to the sort of war it’s been that none of them question the ability of four barely-legal wix to help salvage the sundered bureaucracy of the Minister. Anthony produces a list of Death Eaters who’s whereabouts they don’t currently know; Sue introduces Ernie as the one who’s been forging family trees; Daphne shakes his hand and produces several press conference talking points from thin air that no one can find fault with. 

In the foyer, it’s all dark stone, flashbulbs. Percy is reminded of the aftermath of Dumbledore’s fight with You-Know-Who, which had ended Fudge’s term and deepened the gulf that separated him from his family. He can’t help but shift closer to his dad, as they wait in the shadows during the press conference. 

His dad wraps an arm over his shoulder, draws him in close. “I’m so glad you’re alright, Perce,” he whispers; Ted is talking through something Ernie brought up, on the walk up to meet the press— we can’t make this into a witch hunt. If they don’t have the Mark or we don’t have proof, we can’t just keep looking, or we’ll have nothing left— but all he cares about right now is his dad. “I’m so proud of you.”

Ted Tonks forms the new government; McGonagall confirms that the Dark Lord is dead. His dad’s arm never leaves his shoulders. Percy feels woozy, drunk on exhaustion and the amount of magic he cast in the battle. His dad handles the apparation back to the Burrow for the both of them, without even asking if he wants to go anywhere else— he doesn’t, he doesn’t— and the wards fold open for him as if he’s a child still, as if he never left. 

“Oh,” he says softly, feeling the warm wash of the Prewett magic like a net over him, and then he realizes, through a haze of fatigue, that not even once did he think about testing their strength to keep the secrets shared within them. 

His dad clasps a hand on his shoulder, as the Burrow rises into the sky before them, scraggly roofs and awkward windows. “Even if you’d gone all the way and taken the Mark, son,” he says softly. “You would always be welcome back.”

That statement almost brings him to his knees, right there in the track, but he makes it to the threshold, where his mother embraces him. There’s so much work to be done that’s it’s staggering; he sees it stretching weeks, months, years, entire empires of paperwork. The grief is like an oil field in his chest, immense, seeping. But he curls up onto a spare mattress Fleur transfigures on the floor of the twins room, in borrowed pajamas, and no one makes a joke of it. Good to have you back, Perce, says George, and Fred finds the flattest pillow for him, like he knows he likes, and then makes a joke about he should have tried harder to make Hedwig Minister of Magic— given all she’s done for the war effort, you know— and sleep is like a wave, deep and velvet. 

Is it the Gryffindor he is, or the Slytherin he could have been, who maybe fought the entire war for this moment, to be back home?

(Does it matter, when he did it?)

______________

The fact of the matter is that the first funeral Filius had ever gone to was Fey’s. He had been forty; Philomena had been fourteen and a firecracker, with letters from admirers and stacks of unread tomes. The summer had been hot and unbearable, and Fey had died quickly, so that he’d barely gotten to say goodbye, and in the aftermath, Philomena hadn’t been able to get out of bed for weeks.

Even now, nearly a century later, he can still feel the weight of it against his chest, the way the grief had gotten down into the marrow of him, contaminated the water table. He’s never loved anyone like her, before or since, and that funeral had been the first of the innumerably many he’d been to since. 

All of that to say: when they are dividing up how to handle the aftermath of the battle, Filius offers to take the dead. Minerva’s seen too much of it, Merlin knows, and Pomona is still young, with that soft core to her. And Severus— Pomona had sent him home, thank Merlin, but he would be in no condition to do it either, injured or not, not with the guilt complex and the way his mind was a steel trap. Minerva can play politics, logistics; Pomona can comfort the students; Severus (who is theirs, who was always theirs) can sleep and heal; and he can go out onto the lawn and through the wings of the castle and count the dead. 

The battle ricochets through his mind like a curse gone rogue. Someone— Miss Bulstrode, no doubt, given how she has been behaving all year— managed to wake the castle up, and even though it is going back to sleep now, he can still feel the echos of the magic, the sheer magnitude of it. Silica and wine, it reminds him of. The way the Dark Lord had finally broken through his and Miss Granger’s wards (she had been too thin, from their year on the run, but she cast with tremendous confidence and power, like she always had); fighting the Death Eaters on the threshold to the castle; Mr. Potter, back from the dead and staring down the Dark Lord, and then casting a spell he’d never seen before, because Miss Granger had invented it—

(All the pieces he’d been working on in the eves that Miss Li had passed to him— that’s what they’d been for, hadn’t it? Volo vivre is I wish to live in Latin and what little he worked on suddenly slots together— oh, she really is the greatest wix of the age, isn’t she; maybe even Merlin has his work cut out for him now— and only someone like Mr. Potter, who trusted her with his life, would have the guts to cast it in the face of the unblockable curse. Even walking out to the East Courtyard to deal with the dead, he can’t keep the slight grin off his face at the thought of it, of the idea of sitting down with her in the coming weeks and hearing all about, having her walk through all the equations in long hand.)

It’s over. Somehow, it’s all over. And now there’s just him, in the watery dawn light, taking care of the bodies. 

Most of the forms that liter the lawn are dead, and belong to the other side, wearing ragged dark robes and bone-white masks. Occasionally, he finds one just stunned (or immobilized with the kind of blood magic that simply reeks of Mr. Nott— Filius had seen him pale and exhausted in the hall in the aftermath, and now that it’s over, maybe he can get him to respond to some of the Mastery offers he’d arranged for him), and containment is necessary. The House Elf Union has suffered casualties and injuries, same as the rest of them, but the survivors are all too eager to escort the stunned Death Eaters to some far-flung dungeon room and ward it to hell and back. It’s only partially flooded, Kreacher had said with a nasty smirk. 

Some of the dead are not people he taught; a few of them are mauled or cursed apart beyond recognition, and some medical examiner at St. Mungo’s will have to do the difficult work of picking apart vestigial magical signatures to get an ID. But the vast majority of them, he knows. Taught, mentored, wrote letters of recommendation for, corresponded with. Co-authored publications, went to their weddings. 

The grief, the despair, the anger, the disgust will all come later, he knows. Now, there is only a cold numbness, like ice over a pond, as he levitates Delilah MacMillian into the courtyard, Delilah MacMillian, who got a nearly perfect score on her charms exam and used to write him from the Ministry asking for resources on educational policy. Evelyn Selwyn, a lifetime ago, had been his most trusted Prefect; Declan McNair Senior had, fifty-some years ago, asked him to officiate his wedding. He’d mentored Kayta Mitchell; he’d gone to Algeria one summer to help Nero Crouch with a complex paper on levitation charms. 

Graham Montague and Cassius Rowle are still so young as to be tragedies, but there the snake and skull are, burned into their forearms. But there are more than a few of his former colleagues lying dead on the lawn, including, thank Merlin, the Carrows. He’s almost a bit jealous of whoever got them.

Argus and the Union are mirroring his efforts inside the castle, and he meets a limping and bloodied Argus at the threshold to the east courtyard. “It’s done in there,” he says; he reeks of gunpowder and has a gash over his eye, but there’s a pride and relief to his shoulders that Filius has seldom seen from the caretaker. He doesn’t have much magic left, but it’s enough to seal the wound closed, and take some of the edge of the pain off him. “Pomona went to get the kids, yeah?”

“Yes,” says Filius, feeling his stomach twist at the thought of his students— if he understood Miss Bulstrode correctly, Mr. Nott and Miss Li had carved a doorway through the Hogwarts wards at the base of the Chamber of Secrets that connected to Miss Bulstrode’s parents’s country house in France they only kept for tax purposes. A clever, subversive ploy, which he dearly hopes worked.

“Never thought I’d see the day, but I hope the little snot-faces are okay,” says Argus quietly. Mrs. Norris rubs up against Filius’s leg, and the bodies closest to the threshold have bullet holes right through the chests, and somehow that’s enough for a patronus to Pomona. 

The hummingbird shimmers in the early morning light, and Argus’s cracked face splits into something like a grin. “Argus and the elves and I have sorted everything out,” says Flitwick softly, which makes Argus smile more, as the hummingbird wings away towards Pomona.

What feels like an age, but in reality cannot have been more than five minutes later, they receive Pomona’s back— the great shambling form of her rambling tree. “The kids are all fine,” she says, and he slumps in relief, and even Argus, who spends a good thirty minutes at every staff meeting ranting about whatever crime the brats are up to these days, slumps a bit too. “I’m taking them to the dorms to pack. Minerva’s going to get the train. Let me know if we need to notify anyone.”

Filius shuts his eyes briefly at that, the dead flashing before his eyes. Though, he can’t imagine letting Mr. Nott know his father is dead will be poorly received.

Flich blows out a long breath, and then bends to scoop Mrs. Norris up. “So that’s it, then?” he asks, his voice rough from smoke inhalation. “It’s over, now?”

Filius swallows, seeing again a vision of Voldemort falling dead in the Great Hall, and remembering the hushed snatches of Minerva’s political conversation with some of the Weasleys and Kingsley and Andromeda Tonks, about the future. He can still feel the castle— not in the passive way he normally feels its magic, but alive and hungry and hanging everywhere. Going back to sleep, but still buzzing.

“He’s dead, and the students are safe,” says Filius. “Everything else we can figure out later.”

Argus nods slowly, shifts his jaw. “We didn’t let the bastards take the castle.”

Filius thinks about Severus— the gauntness to his jaw and hands; the way he’d spun the brief duel with Minerva in the Great Hall to disarm the Carrows; how he’d never used his full power this year. How confident Mr. Potter had been, staring down the Dark Lord, and saying he’s mine. Which, if Severus’s patronus really was a one-antlered yearling deer, there was no way around. In his mind, the year is shifting, reconstituting— it had in fact been the four of them against the Dark Lord, holding the castle against the forces of evil; Severus just hadn’t owned up to it. Voldemort had never had the castle, not in anything more than name. 

“No,” says Filius, staring out over the bodies, feeling the castle buckle and shift behind him. “We did not.”

They get the fighters out of the Great Hall, to St. Mungo’s or to Hogsmeade to apparate out. The train leaves in the afternoon, once all the notifications and details of housing are sorted out. Pomona takes Marsha’s death better than Filius would have thought, but then again, she had been her ex-wife for years now. Distant holiday parties flash before his eyes— chatting with her about her runes work; offering to read over her monographs; the way her eyes had tracked Pomona from across the room. At the time it had seemed sweet but now it felt possessive. They leave the bodies, and go up to Minerva’s quarters, crack open the top shelf stuff, and leave a fourth in the bottle out of duty, or habit, or apology. 

The grief will come later, Filius knows. The grief, and the pain, and the sheer weight of living through yet another war. Children coming back next year flinching at shadows; war orphans sorted into his house; the long shadows of the dead. Minerva as Headmaster; trying to fill the positions with qualified people in a way Albus never bothered to; rebuilding the castle brick by brick. 

But it’s over. Voldemort’s body is lying dead in a room off the side of the Great Hall, under the Union’s crackling magic, until they can figure out what to do with it. Hogwarts herself had apparently simply refused to let any staff or students die in the final fight— Minerva and Pomona share stories of her coming to their aid, and even as Filius knocks back the scotch he feels great weights lift from his shoulders, that none of his dreadful visions of small bodies in corridors had come to pass. 

“I don’t know what to think,” says Minerva eventually, after they’ve all had quiet a lot of alcohol. “If his patronus is really— and he certainly wasn’t running this castle like a Death Eater— but he—“ She wipes at her face, which is spotted with reopened cuts and ash and blood. “Albus.”

Filius, who can admit that he had a complex relationship with Albus— the man had been brilliant, in a way he would have adored in a collaborator, but somewhere in there he’d forgotten how to educate instead of play private war games (and he might just have done the deed himself if that had been the price the curse demanded)— says nothing. Pomona pats Minerva’s hand and reaches over for the bottle. “We’ll talk to him,” she says. “There’s got to be some explanation. But he— Minerva, if he really was a Death Eater, he would have killed us all.”

Filius shivers at the thought. Minerva presses her hand into the corner of her eye and nods. Outside, the twilight is slowly beginning to set in, and Filius watches a thestral take flight from the center of the forest.

He focuses on the thought of Severus as he’d seen him in the final battle— bloodied and thin but alive— and summons the bottle to himself, pours them all another round. “If I’m not mistaken,” he says, raising his glass. “We did exactly what we set out to do this year. All the students are alive, Severus is no longer Headmaster, and the Dark Lord is dead.” 

Pomona raises her glass, and Minerva’s face slowly curls into a smile. They toast to that, in the May twilight, the fires out and the dead in the courtyard beneath them and the children alive. 

(And maybe they fall asleep there, Pomona on the loveseat and Filius on the carpet he charmed while drunk to all hell to be soft and levitate, for some reason, and Minerva as the cat, and wake up with raging hangovers, but a few of Severus’s choice Sober-Up potions unearthed from the depths of one of Minerva’s cabinets to the trick.)

(Maybe, somehow, against all odds, they won.)

______________

The board room in the center of what used to be (and hopefully will soon be again) the DLME reeks of stale coffee and ink, and Lucy Li might not have fought in a single battle of the war, and might not have slept in fifty hours, but that isn’t going to stop her from getting this part right. She surveys her forces with forced distance, like they’re her staff for a particularly grueling prosecution case, and tries to look past the fact that a large percentage of them are barely legal wizards who has spent the entire year leading a resistance movement and then fighting an actual war. 

And one of them is her daughter. 

(The damn thing is over, and Sue is here, alive and taking notes so furiously that ink is flecking up on her hand, but Lucy is still second-guessing herself. The first time around, when the Dark Lord used to take meals in her family’s ancestral home and her father had the snake and skull on his arm, and talked about honor and duty and pure blood, it had taken almost more than she had to give— it had taken Micheal— for her to muster enough courage for her single act of rebellion: to take everything she loved and flee. Even if her maiden name hadn’t meant things, the fact remained that she was a prosecutor who’d barely scraped together a D on her OWL DADA exam. There were no wars or battles in her.)

(But should she had tried, for Sue? For Sue, who had written the Dark Lord a Howler in the depths of war if the Quibbler was to be believed; for Sue, who’d spent the year deriving transfiguration solutions to help with the war effort; for Sue, who was playing politics now with the acumen of a Slytherin?)

It’s been years, and she still won’t pretend to understand how Harry Potter’s owl manages to always be exactly where she is needed, with speed and accuracy that defied even magical laws. But she’d been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, eating breakfast, and there had been a tapping on the glass, and there the snowy owl had been, with a scrawled letter from Sue, worded like a telegram: WE WON HE’S DEAD COME BACK IF YOU CAN WE NEED YOUR HELP MEET ME AT THE MINISTRY ENTRANCE. 

Sue’s communication that year had been sporadic at best— Hogwarts had not sounded like a picnic, with the Dark Lord running the country and his right hand man (if she understood the power structure correctly) installed as Headmaster, but Sue was an adult who could make her own choices about how she wanted to fight the war, as much as it kept Lucy and Micheal awake at night— but Lucy had tried to console herself with the fact that her daughter was smart, and powerful, and keeping well out of the line of fire. 

(Sue had met her at the entrance to the Ministry, exhausted and with blood in her hair and a split lip, and Lucy had taken her in her arms. Her embrace seemed to undo something in her, because she’d started sobbing, right there in front of the Ministry with the reporters, and Lucy might not be a duelist but she was enough of a lawyer to do non-verbal notice-me-not and silencing wards.)

The war has been over now for eight days; Ted Tonks, who she supposes is as good a pick as anyone, is the interim Minister of Magic (given that he seems to spend most of his time showing anyone around pictures of his grandson, he seems unlikely to attempt to start a genocidal campaign on the wizarding world). And since apparently pretty much every prosecutor, clerk, and competent Ministry official she worked with before the second war started is either dead, on the Continent, or had no qualms working for the Dark Lord’s administration, the only people left to craft the new order of the world are her, Percy Weasley, and four students who are two months shy of NEWTs. 

And are also more useful than most of the prosecutors and Wizengmont members she’s worked with throughout the years. 

The question is simple, on paper: how are they going to rebuild the world? But nothing is ever simple in practice, and the fear that keeps infecting her naps on the cots Sue’s transfigured is that if they do this wrong, they’ll only keep the war at bay for an interim, and her grandchildren will get caught in the crossfire of the next one. 

We can do this, she tells herself, as she watches the kids— the adults, because they’ve fought a whole war— work. 

Ernie MacMillian, who wears no house ring (she remembers hearing gossip about a disinheriting a few years ago) but has healing cuts on his face and despite the war and the work still has the yellow-and-black tie (and even if he didn’t, she thinks she’d know, just by that cut-glass loyalty sparking dangerously in his eyes), is paging through ledgers and law volumes with the focus of a paralegal, digging up old precedents. He’s some kind of history specialist, and somewhere along the way picked up enough of the muggle world to cite examples of their history— he keeps talking about post-war Germany, and Nuremberg, and Lucy keeps having to send owls to Micheal, have him pull references from the muggle side of things. 

Next to him is Anthony, who’s been at their house enough times over the years to surely qualify as some kind of relation. He’s slept the least of all of them— I didn’t really fight, I just covered the library with Pince, I’ll be fine to keep at it, he’d said at the beginning, but also he doesn’t look like he’d slept in about nine months, but Lucy knows from experience that there’s no stopping Anthony when he wants something. His hands are stained with ink, and he’s pulled in pretty much every record the Dark Lord’s administration had created over their tenure and torn them down to the bones. Besides that, apparently he’d made himself into the expert on the Death Eater Corp over the past several years, and sometimes Kingsley or Bill Weasley will appear in a doorway and ask for something— give me the rundown on Crabbe locations— and Anthony will be on his feet, with an answer and a list. 

Daphne Greenglass is on the other side of the table, talking in a low voice with Percy— they’re putting together some kind of press statement, and are going back and forth on the tone of the words, the implications they might be sending. Lucy knows her only by reputation— the Greenglass Heir; the brilliant potions student she’s half-suspected Sue has a crush on, just from the way she talks about her— but over the last few days, Daphne has been nothing but sharp edges and reworks of press releases and strike-throughs of legal jargon with a precision that Lucy would only expect from herself, and she feels a kind of appreciation, one Slytherin to another. Last names mean nothing; she of all people should know that. 

And Sue. 

In another life, if the war hadn’t happened, Lucy thinks Sue would probably have ended up as a premier transfigurationist, the same way Alexis is shaping up to be a great mathematician. She would have gotten a Mastery with McGonagall before leaving Hogwarts; she’d be off on some high-level apprenticeship now, working with the very best Flitwick would have put her in contact with, in Japan or Peru or Ethiopia. She would never have touched law, or the Ministry, or the parts of her that really would have played well in Slytherin. 

Would she have been happier, as a cloistered academic? Would that world, impossibly far out of reach, been better? 

She shoves that line of thinking away, packed down with the nightmares where Sue didn’t make it out alive (she did, she’s here now, with scars and grey in her hair and exhaustion in every line of her body but here, but alive) and the nightmares where she didn’t make it out of Creighton manor all those years ago and took the Mark and went through with some pureblood marriage. Maybe it could have been better, but this is what they have, and it’s nothing to sneeze at. She still remember the letters from Sue during her second year, when she wanted to threaten the Board of Governors into approving appropriations for mandrakes; she remembers the hours of research Sue had put into the Hogwarts bylaws, trying to find some way to hold the professors to actual standards. And all the letters to the Death Eaters, to the Dark Lord himself?

We can do this, Lucy tells herself again. Spread out before her are case briefs, as assembled by mainly Anthony (if she had her way, she would appoint him as lead investigator of the DLME on the spot, lack of NEWTs be damned), as well as Daphne and Ernie’s notes on every member of the Wizengmont. Hopefully within the month they’d figure out how to deal with the complex politics of the body, and holding preliminary hearings for the Death Eaters in the holding cells beneath the Ministry, and also a general election. But in the meantime, there are laws to repeal, new laws to instate; heads of departments to appoint; Death Eaters to find and arrest; evidence to collect. 

So Anthony and Ernie are handling research (and Ernie is apparently an expert on the ancestry of everyone in wizarding Britain, now); Daphne and Percy are handling the press; and Sue is taking the lead on the legislative review. 

Maybe all this is so visceral, so important, because this is their chance to fix the long-standing rot at the core of their world. Ted will sign what they tell him to sign (and is also a fairly liberal muggleborn) and what if they could just— fix it? 

(Lucy thinks of Micheal, unable to come to Hogwarts parents weekends, or the Quidditch World Cup; thinks of Lupin and the issues the werewolves face; thinks of the discrimination against squibs, and knows Sue is thinking of the same, but with the incendiary flare of a revolutionary.) 

They work through the nights, taking brief breaks to nap, and then on day nine the reinforcements show up— several more barely-legal teenagers, and Micheal, who she’s not sure how he got past the anti-muggle wards into the Ministry, until she spots Hermione, and then everything clicks. 

“They weren’t that robust,” Hermione says, putting away her wand; her hair is pulled back and she’s wearing long sleeves, and her cheeks are thin and hollow, but there’s a grin on her face. 

“Still think if he’d wanted to win, he would have put all his effort into recruiting you,” says Anthony from the other end of the table; Sue and Daphne are moving papers for her to sit. Micheal has two drink holders full of espresso; a boy she distantly places as Theodore Nott is holding two more, very awkwardly, like he’s never done it before. Behind him is a boy she doesn’t think she’s ever seen before, but who Ernie gets up from the table to embrace like a brother and who introduces himself as Justin Finch-Fletchley. 

“Let’s burn it down,” he says, sitting down at the table, and Theodore Nott gives a smile that reminds Lucy of his father’s, long, long ago, in that dining room at the Creighton Manor, but he’s got his sleeves rolled up and there is no Mark. 

That evening, when Susan Bones and someone who can only be Ginny Weasley with that hair appear in the Ministry with food from Molly and basically force them all to take a break at wand point (Ginny has really honed Molly’s sheer force of being), she and Sue take the lift up to the street level, end up in central London on a bench in the sunset, watching the buses and cars and muggles walk by. Sue next to her is a comfort, but also a women who she barely knows, uncanny and strange. Loves, of course, because she would have loved Sue if she came home with that manic light in her eyes and the Mark burned into her forearm, but does not know. 

There’s time though, Lucy thinks, as she eats the sandwich Molly packed.

“Mum,” says Sue, after a long time. “Do you— do you think we can really do this?”

“Do what?” Lucy asks. 

“Fix the world,” says Sue. A man on a moped zooms past them in the dusk, and across the street a couple is walking two Pomeranians. Overhead the sky is orange and yellow, trapezoids of light falling on Sue’s battle-worn face. The smell of ponded water and petrol. 

Lucy runs her hand over the blank slot on her forearm, and thinks of how that first kiss with Micheal had opened up into a night, into a lifetime. Of prosecuting cases for the Ministry that she knew had been decided by the agenda of the Wizengmont, not the facts; of the cancer at the heart of their world. 

She wants to say yes, but Sue is not a child anymore; Sue is a women who would have worn silver-and-green just as well as she wears the blue-and-bronze. “I don’t know,” says Lucy, thinking about the monsters and the old guard and the people who used to be her friends and haven’t talked to her since she married Micheal. “But we can try.”

Silence, except for the shifting traffic. “It’s going to be another war,” says Sue, quietly. “To get all this passed and then keep it intact. To make sure it’s all enforced how we want it to be.”

Lucy sighs, but doesn’t argue, since Sue is right. “Yes,” she says. “But if we do it right, hopefully the fighting will be in courtrooms and boardrooms, and not on the street.”

Sue heaves out a long sigh, and then leans her head on her shoulder; Lucy brings her arm up around her daughter. She feels thinner in her grip— not as thin as Hermione looks, but it’s clear she’s been working herself to the bone this year— and Lucy knows the story of the war will come out in small bits and pieces, over the next several years, as Sue carefully unwinds pieces of it to her. 

“I love you, honey,” Lucy says, as the cars go by and the sunset slips and the road stretches out before them, long and winding but worth it, hopefully, if they can make things better. 

“Love you too, mum,” says Sue, and Lucy feels something settle within her. For the first time in years, she’s not afraid. There’s just the future, filled with open doors, and maybe, just maybe, they can build something. 

______________

The first to leave is Filius, as soon as they’ve dealt with the Dark Lord’s body; she tries not to begrudge him for it. He has an entire family waiting for him in Switzerland, and after the year they’ve had, he absolutely deserves four months of unadulterated joy. 

Then Irma leaves for America andMarjorie; Poppy goes up to London to help at St. Mungo’s; Sybil has some distant cousin in Hungry she decides to go visit. 

Pomona lasts a week— she took Marsha’s body and burned it, Minerva understands, and then Vanished the ashes, the sort of violence only a Hufflepuff betrayed could muster— before coming to her door with her traveling clothes on. Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then Amazon, then the annual Herbology conference in August where Jasper fucking Burns will be presenting his paper on novel magical plants. The audacity of him to use the year he knew I was fighting a war to attempt to outmaneuver me! she says, but Minerva feels a bit grateful to the man, for getting Pomona out of the castle and back out into the glades. . 

Slughorn is gone (good riddance); Bathsheba has gone down to the south of France for the summer, to see her mother; Septima and Aurora have retreated to their own haunts, to lick their wounds from the battle. 

She lasts a fortnight, recovering from magical exhaustion and repairing the wards and coming back from funerals, sleeping as the cat and trying to make the pieces fit together. After that first morning at the battle, she hasn’t been involved in the new regime, except her appointment as interim Headmistress, and so there’s only the news: new laws, the beginning whispers of trials and elections. 

She lasts a fortnight, until even Hagrid and Argus have left (Hagrid to go find his giant half-brother, who had apparently refused to fight with Voldemort; Argus to go take some of the pieces damaged in the battle to a workshop in Paris), and it’s just her and the elves and the letter, staring at her from her coffee table.

Harry’s snowy owl had delivered it, a few days after the final battle, which maybe said everything. His spiky scrawl, as curt as always: if you want answers, I’ll give them to you. And wrapped into the letter was a portkey, humming with his magic, which she’d know anywhere, even after everything. 

The gossip had trickled to her, at the funerals— at Augusta Longbottom’s, she’d seen Harry standing with shaggy hair and a crooked tie, between Weasley and Granger, looking worn to the bone, and there had been whispers, about how maybe he really had been dead, but had just come back. And the way Harry had talked about Severus when he’d been facing down Voldemort— he’s mine, he’d said, with such conviction, and it couldn’t possibly be that simple, could it? A changed patronus and a change of heart and what of Albus?

The gossip and the newspapers won’t have what she knows she wants, which is Severus Snape, answering every question she puts to him until she can finally figure out what she feels about the man, which is somehow enough love that it had almost brought her to her knees when Voldemort said he was dead, but is also sheer disgust because he killed Albus—

(But if he can’t answer them— if there are no answers, if he sits there staring at the floor and says I did it on the Dark Lord’s orders— what then? She’s not Pomona, who’s assimilating at heart; she’s not Filius, who they all know would have done the deed himself if he’d thought it would have broken the curse and finally gotten them a decent DADA professor. Some things cannot be looked past, or forgiven— but it’s Severus—)

There is no more time for stalling, in the end. The wards are fixed; the castle is deserted; the questions are burning a hole in her chest. She takes the portkey in her hand; he didn’t give her an activation word but her guess is correct, a little inside joke that’s been their standing word for years, since a decade ago when all they were for was getting back to Hogwarts after drinking too much at Hogsmeade. 

The only house of Severus’s she’s ever been to is the house in Cokeworth where she knows he grew up, but she’s no fool— with the paranoia on that man, he’s got to have countless safe houses. That’s what she’s expecting— some damp basement in Manchester, or a drafty attic in Peterbourgh— but instead she’s standing in a misty dale, a small cottage in front of her. The air is damp and the sky is gauzy, and the weight of the wards are like an anvil pressing against her, like she’s tunneled through a Fidelus and they know she’s not meant to be here. 

Oh, she thinks dully, trying desperately to get her bearings, as the front door opens and he emerges, all in black, with his hair pulled back. This isn’t a safe house. This is the real deal. 

The interior only confirms her suspicions, as she follows him across the threshold. Shelves and shelves of books; a muggle record player; cloaks and shoes strewn in the foyer, and is that a broomstick— 

She stops dead at the sight of the picture, which is held up to the fridge with a magnet, as muggle as could be. The three of them couldn’t have been more than thirteen when it was taken— before Voldemort came back, probably— and as the magical loop cycles she sees them walk down the track at the Burrow, laughing and talking, completely at ease with each other. They don’t look like Marauders; Harry doesn’t even look particularly like James or Lily. It’s just the Trio, as themselves, framed against a summer sky.

“If you’re going to kill me, at least let me send them to the Burrow first,” says Severus, leaning back against the counter. His arms are crossed, but she can see the edge of his wand poking out of his sleeve. Her eyes jerk up, and then she sees them— sitting out in the back garden, talking in low tones in the mist. 

“I’m not going to kill you, Severus,” she says, collapsing into a chair. Up close, and with the war over, it’s clear how awful he looks, like a body pulled from the bog. He’s wearing muggle sweats, and his feet are bare, and she knows his moods well enough after all these years to understand the thing in his stance— if she drew on him, he’d take it. If she drew and went for the door, for the Trio, she’d be dead before she got to the threshold. 

(Somewhere along the way, the thing she feels for this strange, dangerous man has turned into love, no matter what a shite teacher he was and what the Mark on his arm meant and all the blood on his hands. Was it having to put up with the nonsense that was their yearly nightmare of a DADA professor? Was it his feral protectiveness of his Slytherins, the way he handled the cases of abuse in her house with ruthless precision, the nights drinking at Hogsmeade? Was it sobbing on the cold stones that first winter, after everything had gone wrong? Does it matter? She feels it again now, like being bludgeoned by a riptide. After everything— Albus, and the awful year they’ve had, and the fear she’d felt when she thought he might be dead, never mind that she’d sworn to do the deed earlier in the year— well, once, a lifetime ago, she’d been a hat stall, hadn’t she?)

“I’m not going to kill you,” she says again, and then gently, deliberately, unclips her wand from her holster and lays it out on the table, the wood shining in the light. “I want to understand.”

He makes a pot of tea, as outside the fog closes in, and he tells her about the ring, and the summons, and how he caged one of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s nastiest pieces of work in Albus’s arm for a year. About his request for a quick death. “I told him he needed to tell you, and Harry,” says Severus, with his hands tight around his mug, staring at the table; he’s a good liar, Minerva knows, but he’s not lying now. The emotions in her chest are a thicket, are a forest in flame: what an idiot, to put on a cursed ring. “He— he agreed initially, and then— by the end of the year he’d—“ His face shivers, and Minerva can’t keep the rage off hers— how dare the fool keep this to himself, try to keep her out of the loop; how dare he put Severus in a position like that, alone and starving? 

(How dare he die without saying goodbye?)

Severus raises his eyes to hers; they’re still a little bloodshot. “He said he thought it would be safer if no one knew. I think—“ He swallows. “I think he couldn’t stand to tell you.”

There are tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. She thinks of Albus that last winter, up in his office so exhausted, so weary, and feels the ache of his absence war with her disgust for him that the moment. “He always was a bit too Gryffindor,” she says, flexing her hand against the table, and Severus gives her a small smile. 

He tells her about the feints and misdirects of the year, the lies he told both sides to survive. He summons scotch from the cabinet and tells her about the Prophecy, which she’d already guessed, made her peace with years ago. “I should I have made them pick me as Secret Keeper,” she says, throwing back the snifter. “There’s lots of blame to go around, Severus.”

The story of the lawn fight, the things Severus yelled at Harry in the maw of it. The vow Albus made him make, at the beginning of it, and how it really had then just been about the color of the eyes. But when he tells her of seeing Harry in the woods so thin, his voice cracks and she scoots her chair closer to him on instinct, grabbing for his hand. “Can I—“ she asks, and then there the yearling is, standing in the kitchen with a tilted head and the single antler nub, and she thinks about James showing off his fawn in her office at Hogwarts, a scant two months after Harry was born, and being out in the field with Lily six months before the murders and how her fawn had risen from the dark like a phantom, like a salvation. 

How Albus was always on and on about love, but maybe never anticipated it looking like this— like this, or like the Trio, standing as one.

The rain slicks down the windows; the Trio are still outside, dim shadows through the mist, knees touching. She shifts slightly, so that she can wrap an arm around Severus— Merlin, he’s still so thin— and he slumps into the embrace, his head on her sternum. “I’m sorry,” he says, yet again.

Minerva holds him, thin and quivering, but alive, and thinks about the bodies laid out in the east courtyard, which she had been unable to stomach looking at. About Neville and Ginny with black eyes and cuts on their faces all year long, and how she hadn’t been able to protect them. About Albus, at the beginning, with his twinkling eyes and shining smile and how before Voldemort they’d co-authored papers and talked transfiguration in the twilight, and how maybe if he hadn’t made himself into a warrior and a general, she wouldn’t have had to either. About how Harry doesn’t look like either of his parents, really, and how that’s both lovely and full of grief. 

“Don’t be,” she says, and his hand fists into her cloak and stays there. 

(And what house would the Hat have wanted to sort the thing in her chest now, which just wants to hold this man— this awful, brutal, terrible man— and try to build something here?) 

(Does it matter, when she’s here and he’s alive and it’s love?)

______________

Andromeda picks a strategic time for the confrontation. Ted is at the Ministry; she has sent Draco and his friend Greg to the market to pick up groceries the muggle way; Kingsley and Dora are out tracking down a stray Death Eater— he’s very stupid, mum, nothing to worry about— and Remus, who has been over pretty much every day since the end of the war, has taken Teddy out to the park just down the street. Even the elves are busy with preparing lunch, which means there’s no one for Narcissa to duck behind when Andromeda slips into her study.

The war has been over for just over a fortnight, but it doesn’t feel real. Andromeda keeps jerking awake at night, thinking the pager from the Order is going off, thinking there’s a patronus, and in reality it’s just Teddy or a nightmare or Ted getting back late from the Ministry. Because they won and now he’s the interim Minister, just until they can arrange an election. 

The war has been over for a fortnight, and in between government meetings (apparently she’s “very needed” on several committees; most of what she’s done has been clear her throat and tilt her head at people with absolutely awful ideas, which seems to do the trick) and childcare (Teddy is a delight, just starting to smile; Draco, who despite their best efforts had ended up at the battle, is having nightmares again, but something that must have happened in the course of it seems to have steadied him; his friend Greg— auntie, he’s got nowhere to go, Draco had said, and with a last name like Goyle she believed him— was not the sharpest tool in the shed, but was polite, and earnest, and she liked him in spite of herself), there have been only funerals. Normal funerals, for Aberforth and Muriel Weasley and Augusta Longbottom, and then the strange sort of service you have in the overgrown corner of the Black graveyard with your sister, where you lower the body of your other sister into the fresh gape of clay and try to feel something, anything. 

(Bellatrix was, by the end, undoubtedly a monster; Andromeda knows that if she hadn’t intervened, her sister would have probably killed her daughter. When the Longbottom boy’s bolt of green had hit true, and she had fallen dead to the flood of the Great Hall in the watery pre-dawn light, she’d felt only relief. But in the graveyard, Cissy’s hand clasped in hers, all she’d been able to think about was the summer mornings when they’d romped through the glades, and how Bella used to write her letters while she was off at Hogwarts, and how they’d used to whisper their crushes to each other, in the haunted halls of the manor they grew up in.)

Narcissa is scrawling out blood magic equations in long hand on the chalkboard; Andromeda watches her works for a moment, and then takes a deep breath, attempts to compose herself. She’s been waiting to have this conversation until the house is empty, but also maybe because she’s loved having at least one sister. And if this conversation goes poorly, she might be back down to zero.

“He’s in the house, isn't he?” she asks, and Narcissa, startled, drops the chalk and turns to her, her hair flying. The chalk shatters into several pieces agains the hardwood floor. “Basement? Attic?”

They stare at each other for a minute. There’s a healing scar on the side of Narcissa’s beautiful face; Andromeda knows the web of burns up her own neck are too cursed to ever go away. Their eyes are the exact same color, Andromeda knows, but Narcissa has no cards left to play if she’s guessed, and eventually her shoulders slump a little. “The shed,” she says, quietly, bending down to pick up the pieces of the chalk. “I enlarged it on the inside.”

“Do you want to have this conversation about him, or with him?” Andromeda asks, leaning into the door frame and trying to project a false sense of calm. The ghost of Lucius Malfoy has hung over the house all year— beloved father and husband, but also a fucking Death Eater, one of the best and most loyal, the kind of person who went out to the glades and murdered muggle children— and Andromeda had again and again tried to resolve the man she knew from Order intel with the stories Draco and Cissy would tell. 

Cissy crosses her arms, defensive, and raises her chin. “We don’t have to have it at all.”

And they don’t. They’re both Slytherins. Cissy saved her husband and family; isn’t it time for Andromeda to return the favor? Andromeda sketches out this future, briefly— Lucius healing up in the shed, playing nice with the family, because if nothing else he was a slick, charsmatic bastard— and they harbor a war criminal. Because he’s a good father and a good husband and will learn to be a good uncle, great-uncle, brother-in-law, they’ll forget about what he is, about the Mark on his arm and the dead in the fields?

There is a lot Andromeda thinks she could have forgiven. Hell, Cissy is here, isn't she, and Remus Lupin is watching her grandson, and she’s spent the better part of a week trying to put together immunity for Severus fucking Snape of all people, because Harry Potter asked. There’s a lot she thinks she could forgive, but what she cannot get past is place on her nephew’s arm where the Mark used to sit, and the haunted thing in her sister’s eyes, from playing host to the Dark Lord for more than a year.

“He went back to him, Cissy,” she says softly, and Narcissa flinches. “He of all people knew what kind of monster he was, and he had years to build contingencies, and what did he do?” Narcissa shuts her eyes. “He brought him to your house.”
Silence, in the study, for a long moment. Finally, Narcissa says, dully: “You saw the Prophet yesterday. Li’s pushing for life in prison for anyone with the Mark.”

We both know he deserves it, Andromeda thinks, but does not say. Not even a new, Geneva Convention-approved prison— Azkaban with the dementors. Instead, she says, “If he cops to it and plea-bargains, he could get away with forty. And in ten years, they’ll be paroles and pardons, like there always are.” Narcissa swallows, the weight of all the time heavy on her.

“Cissy, I know you love him,” she says. “But you can’t deny that he hurt you.” The chalk twists in Narcissa’s hands, her magic rearing up like honey-suckle and asphalt. “And Draco—“

The chalk shatters with a burst of magic, and she has an armful of sister, her sobs heavy and wet against her shoulder. She’s a little surprised, but her arms come up around Narcissa’s thin frame all the same. 

In the end, they go out to the shed together, the May twilight heavy across the overgrown garden. Inside is a queen bed, a little kitchenette, stacks of books, and the latest Daily Prophet. Lucius is sitting up in bed, reading, and what little color there is in his face drains when he sees her, before Narcissa steps in front of her. “It’s Andi, dear,” she says, and Andromeda wonders how long the war will have to over for before people will stop being afraid of the resemblance. 

Up close, it’s clear that Lucius is in rough shape— his skin his ashy, his hair is dull, and his cheeks are hollow. Narcissa sits on the bed next to him, and he leans into her, his forehead into her shoulder, and Narcissa runs a bony hand over his hair, and Andromeda understands, even though she doesn’t want to. 

“Lucius,” she says, and the man raises his ruined face to look at her. “You have two choices here.” The skylight above them is laying sun on his pale face, and the wards keyed to her blood let her know that Remus has just come home with Teddy. “You can live in a shed in my backyard like the coward you are, spend the rest of your life jumping from shadows and forcing us to all lie to protect your secrets.” Narcissa flinches, but Lucius doesn’t drop her gaze. “Or, we can take you into the Ministry, and make sure you get due process, and you can face the mess you’ve made of everything you’ve ever touched and try to be something better.” 

Silence, except for the distant chirping of the birds in the dusk. Narcissa warps both of her hands around Lucius’s, but he’s still looking at her. “I didn’t have a choice,” he says, which is bullshit, but she won’t argue.

“You do now,” she says. 

He sits so long that she thinks she’ll have to go to some kind of plan B. But eventually, he shakes Narcissa’s hands from his and slowly, agonizingly, draws himself to standing.

When they make into the Ministry, it’s Susan Bones, of all people, who’s clerking the front desk of the DLME; Susan Bones, who has new scars and looks very much like her aunt and rises from the desk fluidly, but without malice. 

“Thank you for coming in without a fight, Mr. Malfoy,” she says, and Narcissa is crying quietly behind her, and then it’s over, a holding cell and no further questions.

“I can’t believe he just agreed to turn himself in,” Ted says later, once the dust has settled (Narcissa doesn’t talk to her for three weeks, but Draco comes up to her while she’s working in the garden and thanks her— it felt really weird that mum was just going to try to pretend none of it ever happened).

Andromeda thinks about Narcissa, standing in her kitchen nine months ago, offering her a future. She thinks about Bella’s mad laugh and how she used to come crawl in bed with her after a nightmare. About how the hall at Hogwarts had filled with the dead of the war, and how Harry had said her favorite cousin Regulus, who she’d long thought had died loyal to the monster, had actually died trying to fight him. 

(Does it make her evil, if maybe it was never about the dead? There is a part of her, the part that could have done damn well in Ted and Nymphadora’s house, which knows that if Lucius had had the guts to turn up to an Order safe-house anywhere in the course of the war, bloodied and terrified but loyal, she would have treated his wounds and brought him home, like they did with Draco. She’s just mad that he didn’t, that he couldn’t give them that much.)

“He’s a coward, at heart,” she says. “He was too exhausted to fight me.” The rest of it comes bursting out of her, after weeks of trying to keep it at bay: “He doesn’t deserve them, you know.”

Ted hums a murmur of ascent.“Well, we bought him his life,” he says. “Maybe he can figure it out in prison.”

At breakfast, she surveys the table: Dora, who’s fallen back asleep on Kingsley’s shoulder; Kingsley himself, who had apparently done so many war crimes no one thought he should be Minister; the current Minister, who was also her dorky, charms-nerd of a husband; Draco, who had finally started to put gel back in his hair; Draco’s friend Greg, who the Dark Lord apparently couldn’t be bothered with (his lose); Narcissa, walking around holding Teddy; and Remus Lupin, who looks out of place and shabby but is here all the same. 

And maybe in ten years, when he’s earned it, Lucius, Andromeda thinks, and then shivers, but it’s already a weird fucking family; why not make it a bit more weird?

What a thing, to be alive to make such choices. 

______________

(Later, the magical historians, Ernie MacMillian among them, will fixate on this period: the Tonks Tenure, they’ll call it— one hundred and fifty-one days that forever shaped wizarding history. Ernie’s monograph, buoyed by first-hand experience and interviews with all the key figures, will eventually be considered the defining work. Sue and Anthony and Daphne never let him live it down, and years and years later will pull out copies at dinner parties and do dramatic readings, and he’ll pretend to be embarrassed but secretly, he’s always delighted.)

(They were unable to completely fix everything, of course, and many of their laws and decrees and codes are subject to years of withering review in the Wizengmont, but it’s undoubtedly better. They build in pro-elf legislation; the prohibition of discrimination based on blood status is eventually used to repeal the anti-werewolf legislation; wix can now opt for a trial by jury; wizarding Britain now, at least on paper, agrees with the Geneva Convention. It’s not perfect but it’s better.)

(Still to come: Pomona sitting down to a tea with Severus. He’ll explain it all, in that distant, halting tone, but she won’t ask to see the patronus. Not with pictures of the walls in Lake District and holes through the wards— for the Trio, but also for her and Minerva and Filius. You’re a good liar, Severus, she’ll tell him. But it’s been a long time since you’ve been able to lie to me. Ron, too, will need absolution— in August he’ll ask to meet with her in Hogsmeade, and tell her the long scope of the quest and the war and the coming back, and how none of them think they can stomach returning to the castle. She’ll look at him, and think of the eleven-year-old who she once gave detentions for punching the people who bad-mouthed Harry, and put her hand over his. There’s nothing more I could teach you, Ron, she’ll tell him. You’re hardworking, and kind, and loyal.)

(In the years to come, Percy will often toy with running for Minster, but one by one all the bids will slip through his hands. There will be legislation to enact; there will be better, more qualified candidates— no one in their right mind would have launched a campaign against Sue Li. But there will also be nieces and nephews who he would like to actually see. There will be family dinners, and little-league quidditch matches, and Audrey, a clerk in the newly formed Department of Magical Justice who he tries to date casually before realizing, all at once, that he actually doesn’t think he can live without her. And, eventually, there will be children, and is it the Gryffindor, who puts aside ambitions of power for them? Is it the Slytherin he could have been, who decides being home with them is ambitious? Does it matter, when he does it?)

(Later, in the heat of July when he is relaxing in Switzerland, Filius will receive a letter from Miss Granger, which says in more words I’ve never written a paper, can you help? He crafts her an international portkey and sends it back with the magnificent snowy owl— Mr. Potter’s, isn’t it— and she comes out to see him, with stacks and stacks of notes and a half-crooked smile on her face. They spend hours and hours at the back table at the pub, as she takes him through the magnificence that is volo vivre and he teaches her how to write a paper— the first of many, he can only assume— and piece by piece the story of the war comes out. How somehow, the magic her and Mr. Weasley and Mr. Potter had woven between them was strong enough to brush death aside. At the end of it, he will go to shake her hand, and she will hug him. You can call me Hermione, Professor, she’d said, and he’d said, well, in that case, you can call me Filius, and it is the first of many papers will they co-author.)

(Later on, Lucy Li will prosecute the surviving Death Eater Corp to the best of her ability, thinking about haunted manor houses and cold hands and Micheal, and what these people wanted to take from her. But when Sue, twenty years on, comes to her house and says I’m thinking of running for Minister, though her stomach heaves at the thought, she does not flee. She embraces her daughter, and helps her figure it out.)

(In the future, Minerva will know Harry so well she will almost never think James when she sees him, in the way Severus long ago stopped looking at his eyes and thinking Lily. He is simply Harry— Severus’s child, for all intents and purposes; the boyfriend and then husband of the single greatest Quidditch player Gryffindor has ever produced; the best friend of the Head Auror and the greatest wix of the age; the DADA professor. He never calls her Auntie Minnie, but his and Ginny’s children do. And she’ll die missing James, she knows, but she can still marvel at the miracle of what she has: Harry, alive; Severus, alive; Ginny, as much of a firebrand at thirty as she was at sixteen when she won them the cup and then fought a war, and after all the death, she won’t take anything for granted.)

(It will be years before Lucius is released from prison, just as Andromeda said. He will do fourteen years and six months, get out in time to attend Draco’s wedding. By then, the Malfoy house elves will have burned what remained of Wiltshire to the ground, and the row house in Manchester is home to them all, all the strange permutations of their family— Narcissa with her blood magic research; Remus, when he’s not tutoring; Tonks and Kingsley and their families; Teddy, when he’d not off at Hogwarts. I thought it would be more like Grimmauld, Lucius will say to her, one night when he’s been out of prison for a couple of months and they’re sitting out on the back stoop together, and Andromeda will think of a sister long-buried, and a family she almost never got, and ultimatums, and say you know me better than that by now, Lucius.)

(And years and years later, on the anniversary of the battle, when they hold vigil at the castle and mourn the dead, the four of them who used to be Heads together will sit out by the forest in a vigil of their own, passing the bottle back and forth and waiting for the thestrals to come out. Filius, who will die wearing the Ravenclaw ring, will be older and smaller but with more co-authorships; Pomona, who has a new wedding band to pair with the Hufflepuff signet, will have dirt under her nails and an arm around Severus; Minerva, who the Board of Governors and the public all agree is the best Head Hogwarts has had in years, has no ring, only a faint knowledge that if she were to need it to, the castle would wake to protect them all. And Severus, who lost the decade-long fight he put up and now has the title to go with the Slytherin ring, almost looks happy, his head on Minerva’s shoulder.)

(They can all see the thestrals; they have been able to for decades. But here they are all the same, together.)

Chapter Text

They spend May on gravesides, and memorial services, and holding back each other’s hair when one of them is unable to keep down the heavy post-funeral food, not with all the grief and nerves and starvation welling up from within. The Burrow is a revolving door of people, which is nice sometimes (Merlin, it’s good to see Susan), but sometimes it’s not, and they go to Birmingham, where Hermione’s parents are settling back in and will order takeaway.

But sometimes, Birmingham is oppressive— the noise of cars backfiring will have him on his feet, wand in hand, and it’s hard to go for a simple walk without looking over the shoulder for Death Eaters— and so they go to Lake District.

They could go to Grimmauld, Ron supposes, if they wanted to get away. The Fidelus charm has caved completely in now, but Hermione’s powerful enough for a new one, and him or Harry could be secret-keeper. Maybe one day they’ll do that, just to have a safe-house. But Grimmauld, despite all the efforts they put into it, is haunted several times over now, and if Ron doesn’t want to go back to see how much of his blood on is the foyer floor, how little do Harry and Hermione? 

It had been a strange thing, a week after the war had ended, to apparate with Harry to Lake District, and be met there by Snape. Who still looked a little rough— too thin, mostly; not that the three of them looked much better— but was leagues better than he’d looked at the end of the battle, when they’d met him in the corridor and he’d hugged Harry.

It still feels like a con, or an illusion, to have him back. And not just back, but unabashedly on their side, like Hermione’s parents. He fixed Harry’s holly-and-phoenix wand, and bought him shoes and shirts and coats after their year on the run, and keyed the two of them into the wards along with Harry, so they could apparate into his inner-most sanctum, because they were that important to Harry, because Harry was that important to him. 

After Aberforth’s funeral (in the graveyard in Hogsmeade, with snow still in the shade, and McGonagall sobbing and mud on the hems of their dress robes), they’d come back to Lake District without even meaning to, sat down on the back steps still in their good clothes and are just watching the clouds roil. The war has been over for three weeks; Hermione had thrown up just outside the church yard and Harry after the apparation. Snape is inside, probably reading or brewing; someone in the Ministry is pursing a pardon for him, but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of urgency. Maybe it’s the Slytherin in him, Ron thinks, as Harry stretches out his legs and Hermione idly casts and dismisses the kinds of wards she could do in her sleep. He survived, Harry survived, and that’s enough. 

It’s not enough for Ron, but he doesn’t know how to voice that, not yet. They won and it’s over, but somehow everything seems angular and ruined all the same. Harry and Hermione and his family are all alive, and that’s so much, that’s more than he thought he would get, but Susan and Neville are orphans twice over, and they buried Aunt Muriel in the overgrown field behind where the Weasley manor had been before the Death Eaters burned it down at the very beginning of last war, and Anthony had invited them all to his grandmother’s funeral in Bath, so they’d stood in the cemetery with the low stone walls and Anthony’s sisters were so small, still, and Ron had tried to focus on how since they won the war they’d be safe, but all he’d felt was a kind of creeping horror, like a scream caught in his chest. 

The worst one had been Mundungus. Mundungus, who had never had to stay— he was a crime lord, he could have made it anywhere— but did. But did, and payed for it with a crisp bolt of AK in the final battle. He’d been alone in the world except for the Order, Ron knew, and so it had been the three of them and the twins who’d stepped up to the plate for the burial, in the wane days after it had ended. The five of them had been up late in the garage at the Burrow, studying each other’s new scars— George was missing fingers, and Fred hadn’t escaped the final battle without some nasty hex damage— and it had been George who’d produced the liquor without a word. The vodka burned but it was cold, and they’d drunk it straight from the bottle, all of them thin and exhausted and worn through. The light from the overhead had caught on the streaks of grey burned through Fred’s hair, from curses that brushed too close. 

The minutia of the past year was the elephant in the room, but Ron couldn’t bring himself to ask questions of the twins. They’d alluded to the squatting they’d done, on the fringes of the muggle world; the raids they’d fought in, the relocations they’d coordinated. Sure they’d done all that; sure, he and Harry and Hermione had starved in the woods and found the horcruxes, and yet here they were, with the bodies of everyone they couldn’t save.

The alcohol seeped into his blood, until they were all drunk enough to start talking. George told them the story of Dung turning up to an Order safe-house with fourteen muggleborns in tow, which he rescued single-handedly from some ancient manor. “He’d robbed it years ago,” George said, taking the bottle back from Harry. “They hadn’t changed the wards.”

Ron thought of Dung showing up at Grimmauld with books he stole for Hermione, and how they could always get him to stay for dinner, kip on the couch. How he’d taught them to pick-pocket that awful winter break his dad had been in St. Mungo’s. “He helped us plan our Gringotts break-in,” said Hermione, picking at splinters on the floor. “He— he theorized all their strategies and what kinds of wards I’d have to break and he was pretty much completely right.”

Silence, for a moment, except for the soft beginnings of rain outside. Harry had rubbed at his face. “When we were at Grimmauld,” he said, his voice rough with grief. “He said he— he’d joined the Order because he owed Dumbledore a debt.”

Ron remembered this conversation— Hermione had been furiously assembling the early stages of volo from Regulus’s notes and when Mundungus had come in late, with blood on his face, Ron had patched him up. They’d sat in the least-haunted living room and heat lightning had marbled the sky. 

“But it wasn’t about a debt anymore,” said Harry, shutting his eyes. “It was about us.”

In the end, with half the bottle gone, they’d decided that the kind of burial Dung would be proudest of them for was a guerrilla one, breaking and entering. He’s a Selwyn bastard, ain’t he? Fred had said, and so there they were, in the dusky English twilight, on the edge of the wards around the ancestral Selwyn cemetery. 

“I feel like we’re going grave-robbing,” Ginny had said, crouching in the tall grass as Hermione and Fleur and Flitwick messed with the wards. Harry cocked his head towards the aspen wand still strapped to her left wrist and raised an eyebrow. 

They made quick work of the loamy soil, cutting out a box in the heather between two leaning gravestones. They’d brought most of the Order that had made it out, which at this point felt like mostly Weasleys, standing wreathed in wards in the graveyard.

There weren’t words, in the decaying twilight, in the middle of a B&E. There was only Hermione reaching down to her ankle sheath and drawing the yew wand he’d stolen for her, laying it down on his chest in the grave, and then Ginny doing the same, and then the soft thumps of earth and the headstone: HERE LIES MUNDUNGUS FLETCHER, THEIF, CRIME LORD, RESISTANCE FIGHTER, AND FRIEND, WHO DIED TO SAVE THE WORLD. YOU WISH YOU COULD HAVE HIM.

At Lake District, with the mist pouring down on them, Ron shuts his eyes, splays his hand out into the damp grass. They won, and Harry’s here and they have Snape back and none of his family is dead, and Fleur is expecting, but why does it still hurt so much? 

A few nights later, he wakes from a nightmare in the attic bedroom in the Burrow, his chest pounding. Harry and Hermione are still asleep, curled up on the other side of the bed, and it’s not like he’s okay with the dreams where they die— he’ll never be okay with those dreams, he doesn’t think— but he’s used to them. This dream—

He slips out of bed, the silencing ward like second nature. She’s not in her room, which means she’s on the pitch (he hopes), and he’s relieved to find he’s right, his shoulders sagging as he makes it out there, and sees her shape swooping up against the moon. 

“Ron?” she calls, ducking down from the sky to meet him, slinging the broom up over her shoulder. As she approaches, it’s clear she too came off something rough— she’s in one of Percy’s old Stevenage jumpers, and her feet are bare. 

“Nightmare too?” he asks, and her face twists, and then she plops down beside him, all bony shins and a tangled mane of red hair.

“Do I die in the future?” she says, and Ron feels somehow that she’s a thousand miles away even though she’s right here. How many years has it been since they’d have normal conversations, making fun of Percy or Draco or the other’s British League teams instead of regarding each other with the cool tactical prowess of proven warriors?
“Bellatrix killed you,” says Ron, without preamble. “When— when you and Nev and Luna were dueling her in the Great Hall.” Next to him, Ginny’s jaw shifts, and then she snakes out her hand through the grass to take his hand. Silence, except for the late-night drone of insects.

“Harry didn’t come back, in mine,” she says softly. “Voldemort dumped his body on the front steps and then we kill him and have to go bury Harry.”

Ron thinks about the graveyard in Godric’s Hollow and shivers. Ginny licks her lips. “Did you really just— just bring him back? Because of whatever shit you did to those rings?”

“It was mainly Hermione,” Ron answers automatically. “But— yeah. I mean— I think we all— we all died, out there.”

He is not expecting to have his tough-as-nails little sister, who fire-bombed manor houses and master-minded a resistance movement, to just wrap her arms around him, her bony chin a point on his shoulder. After he gets over the shock, he returns the embrace. 

“I got a letter from the Harpies,” Ginny says, after a long moment. Above them, the waxing moon is a pale yellow crescent. “Inviting me to summer workouts. Like it fucking matters.”

“Of course it matters,” says Ron. “They’re the best bloody team in the league and you don’t even have NEWTs. That’s amazing, Gin.”

She untangles her arms from him and wraps them around her legs, propping her chin on her knees. “What are you and Harry and ‘Mione going to do, now?” she asks. 

Ron shuts his eyes, blows out a long breath in the moonlight. “No fucking clue,” he says. “We tried not to talk about it, out there. Because it never felt real.” 

Ginny stretches out her legs, and then leans back into the heels of her hands. “All I’m going to say is that you better marry Susan. Because she didn’t shut up about you all last year, and also there’s no way in hell you could do better.”

Ron is glad the dark hides the seeping blush he can feel warming his face. “Well, Harry was on and on about you too. He’d get out the map and just sit there watching your dot move around.”

“Creepy Slytherin git,” says Ginny, but he can hear the giddy grin in her voice. “Who are we going to set Hermione up with?”

“Not touching that shit with a ten-foot pole,” says Ron, leaning back in the grass. “Still not over her and Terry Boot.” 

Ginny lets out a cackle of laughter. “Perce?”

Ron groans. “Why not Draco, while we’re at it?” Ginny’s laugh is loud and steadies something within him. “Trust me, all she’s going to want to do for the next decade is read and get about ten masteries.”

Silence, and the night, and the waxing moon. Harry and Hermione’s heartbeats are slow in sleep, and the threads stretching back to them are guide-wires, humming and burning with magic. “If you don’t try out, what are you going to do?” says Ron. “Because no offense, but I don’t see you going back to get your NEWTs.”

“Hey,” says Ginny, with no heat, giving him a light punch on the shoulder. “I could get so many NEWTs.”

“Maybe even more than Hermione,” says Ron, and Ginny punches him again.

“You’re not going back, are you?” says Ginny, after a long moment. 

Ron thinks about the turrets burning against the black night sky, and blood on the flagstones, and the dead basilisk in the bowels of the castle, and the words a teacher carved into the back of his best mate’s hand. “Never,” he says, and he knows it’s true. “I don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re not going back.” 

Ginny finds his hand again in the grass. “I don’t think I could do it either,” she says. “It’d be like going into a haunted house.”

“Yeah,” says Ron. “Exactly.”

The dawn bleeds in fingers across the sky. Eventually, Ginny says, “I haven’t played a real match in a year. I haven’t really trained in nine months. I’m not sure I’d even make it on the reserve squad.”

Oh. Ron feels the glut of love he has for his sister— which has always been there, but has spent this past year carefully curtailed because there simply wasn’t room— hit him like a tidal wave. To show him the true cards she has, underneath her unflappable and infallible Ginny fucking Weasley facade? 

“Gin, the whole league’s been gutted. Krum hasn’t played a match in a year, and they’d be idiots not to let him start for Ipswich. If they invited you, they want you. Besides, who does Holyhead even have right now?”

“Jackson Kelly,” says Ginny, which is a name Ron knows very well, after his four-year stint on the Canons. 

“Well, I think Hermione could probably play Seeker better than Kelly,” says Ron, thinking of a very memorable muffed catch a few years ago. “So maybe she should go instead.”

“Hey,” says Ginny, a grin on her face. She wraps her arms around her legs and presses her cheek to her knees. “You’re right though.”

“So you’ll go?”

“I’ll go,” she says, after a long moment. “But you lot have to figure out what you’re doing next year.”

“Deal,” says Ron, and the sunrise bathes them both in light.

___________________

There is no grave to dig, no body to bury, so they just stand in the cemetery out back behind the Longbottom Manor, the pines pointed to the sky and a few last patches of snow clinging on in the shadows. The joint headstone with the Frank Longbottom Senior, who Neville remembers only in the edges of nightmares, is finished except for the date, so all there is to do is carve it, except he doesn’t know and probably will never know which side of the New Year his grandmother was murdered on. 1997, or 1998? 

Clay and pine needles on his boots. Someone— Mrs. Weasley, he thinks— organized food, and McGonagall gave the eulogy after he said he didn’t want to. What would he have said? I loved her and she loved me but sometimes it didn’t feel right, enough? 

I didn’t want her to die, but I have a crew and I think I’m going to be alright?. 

He is polite in the receiving line, a fact made easier because most of the relatives he loathes from his childhood are either dead or absent (it is possible Luna or Ginny sent them threatening or ominous letters; they are just like that sometimes) and the few who did turn up are easy enough to give a firm handshake to and then let Luna swoop in and distract. 

It’s fine. Condolence cards, murmured words; Ron whispering something to Hermione and then her switching the liquor someone poured him for water, assuming he won’t want to get drunk, and he’s right. Harry’s offered embrace is real and solid, two orphans a few times over trying to grieve for complex people. 

It’s fine, and it’s too much. He slinks away from the reception, back into the shadows of the trees and the cemetery. He sits down on the cold clay and stares at the blank space on the headstone. He knows the date doesn’t matter that much, but it feels vital. 

The rustling of footsteps on the needles behind him, and he draws his shoulders up. Ginny, probably; Luna would have let him walk off, knowing he needed space. Ginny follows, which he loves most of the time but—

(But she still has everything— a family with two parents and six bothers; a kitchen filled with light; a boyfriend; a future where she plays on the World Cup squad. All he has is an abandoned house and a closed ward and an empty grave.)

He turns his head as the figure sits down next to him, but instead of Ginny, all angles and a sheet of red hair, he finds Susan, in black dress robes and her blonde hair fluffy. She’s sitting just far enough away that their shoulders aren’t touching. 

He would ask her to leave, but it’s Susan— if anyone understands, it’s her. He just stares at the place where the date is going to go and thinks about a lifetime ago, when he’d still been so young and nervous and had followed her into the woods at Hogwarts, up to the base of the castle, on the anniversary of her parents’s deaths. There hadn’t really been anything to say then, either. Just the staggering wall of grief. 

He doesn’t mean to lean into her shoulder, but then he is, the point of it a grounding comfort. Her fingers are warm against his cold ones, and he doesn’t know why now of all times the tears are coming— they won—

“It’s okay, Nev,” says Susan, as he collapses into her, her arms coming up around him like they always have, always will. Her magic, like peat and gauze, curls out from her, enveloping them. “Let it out.”

He clutches at her robs and just sobs. 

(Sobs for his grandmother, body never to be recovered. Sobs for his parents, in the Closed Ward, like this is any other day. Sobs for the dead laid out in the Great Hall and the year they’ve had, fighting shadows and fighting Voldemort and how much it’s hurt, even if he hadn’t admitted it to himself.)

(Sobs for the childhood in the manor, ancient relatives trying to prove he was magic, like if he didn’t have it, he was nothing. Sobs for his grandmother handing him his father’s wand. Sobs for the fact that Susan understands, and Harry too, and how they won but it’s not enough, because even if Voldemort has never come back there would still be all this blood, this great gulf of the dead, the dead, the dead—)

Susan’s sobbing too, he realizes, the cold May evening closing around them like a great jaw. Eventually, after Merlin knows how long, they draw back from each other, wipe snot from their faces. The sunset is smearing orange light over the cemetery.

“What date should I put?” Neville asks, staring up at the empty headstone.

“Both,” says Susan, drawing herself to standing and offering a hand. “1997 or 1998. So they’ll know she went down fighting.”

The sentiment sits right in Neville’s gut, and he raises his wand, inscribes the stone. Augusta Marie Longbottom, beloved wife and mother and grandmother, 1934-1997 or 1998. Susan raises her wand, and summons from midair a misshapen wreath of carnations, lays them over the headstone. 

“Do you want to go get drunk now?” she asks, and Neville finds that actually, he really does. 

It still hurts, when he wakes up on the floor of the room Susan and Ginny are sharing at the Burrow, his head ringing and his stomach heaving, but he’s less afraid, somehow. On paper, he’s been orphaned twice over, now, and is alone in the world except for a closed ward and distant relatives who would have dumped him at a muggle orphanage if he’d turned out to be a squib. 

Susan’s arm is flung carelessly over his shoulders; Ginny’s snores are echoing from the bed above them, and Luna is sitting in the window with her legs crossed, chewing on the end of a colored pencil as she sketches. Based on the lack of her presence in his fuzzy memories from last night (he has a vague memory of Ginny punching someone, and Ron and Hermione and Harry doing a karaoke song so bad that it got a stein of beer thrown at them, and the weight of someone keeping him upright he’d know anywhere as Hannah), she was probably the one sober enough to bring the water by his head. 

How could he be afraid, when he has all this now? He thinks about haunted houses, and the closed ward, and how the summer after first year he’d gone deep into the wood at the manor with the wand that had been his dad’s and dug down into the peaty earth and buried it. He thinks about the way the sword had felt in his hand when he’d drawn it from the Hat, reaching for it off instinct, and Susan’s arm over his shoulder is a heavy constant, and he knows, suddenly and with complete certainty, that if he hadn’t made it out of the battle they wouldn’t have put him in the cold dark ground out back of the Longbottom Manor. They would have put him in the little Ottery-St.-Catchpole graveyard, next to Cedric and Luna’s mum and they would have come to visit. Would have planted morning glory and trumpet vines. 

“I don’t want to live at the Manor,” he tells Ginny and Luna, a few weeks later, in the fading days of May. They’re in Ginny’s bedroom again; Ginny is freshly showered from flying (she starts summer workouts with the Harpies in three days); Luna has her hair in two space buns and a list Flitwick sent her of Mastery contacts. 

“Then don’t,” says Ginny, wrestling with the hair brush one final time, before Luna holds out a hand and she hands it over, sits at her feet. 

“It’s nothing like a manor should be,” says Luna, starting in on Ginny’s tangled mane. “No family. Just ghosts. I don’t think anyone would be mad at you for wanting to live with real people.”

The Lovegoods have a spare room, and Xenophilius’s potions garden is dreadfully overgrown after the year on the run. When Kingsley comes knocking, asking if he could perhaps help out in the Auror office in the aftermath— nothing long term, just until everything get settled— the sword of Gryffindor is hanging over the mantle where Luna’s dad mounted it (it will be so thrilling to see it vanish when it’s needed elsewhere, he’d crowed) and how can he say no?

But Ginny comes down every day, or they go up, Luna with frog spawn in her pockets and letters for Hedwig to take to her potential Mastery options. He tames the gardens, and Xenophilius ropes Ron’s dad into helping him build a greenhouse, which leans and leaks and howls on occasion until Hermione and Fleur turn up one day to put it to rights. 

The Longbottom Manor is filled with ancient portraits of relatives who he only knows from family trees, and cursed suits of armor, and books so dull even Hermione and Anthony and Ernie don’t want them. He wanders the halls, looking for anything he wants to take with him to the Lovegoods, and finds nothing. Tapestries shimmering with anti-moth wards; spider-webs; ghosts. He stands for a long time in front of the window where he was dropped, looking at how far away the ground seems even now, and then shuts the curtains, releasing a shower of dust. 

He almost doesn’t go into his gran’s bedroom, but the magic of the house seems to draw him there, like a warm hearth. It’s mostly empty, but the jewelry box is bristling with wards that let him through easily, and in the bottom, underneath the enchanted bracelets and ancient House of Longbottom jewelry, he finds it. 

On top of a stack of letters in handwriting he recognizes as his own— his Hogwarts letters, where he’d tried so hard to be formal and detailed and right— there is an envelope with his name, in his grandmother’s handwriting.

He opens it, willing his hands not to shake. 

The note isn’t long— I doubt I’ll make it out of this war alive, so in the event of my demise, I have taken precautions. But he stares at the last two sentences with tears forming slowly in the corners of his eyes, and then tips the envelope into his palm. 

I’m proud to call you my grandson, Neville. I love you.

And sitting in his palm is the Longbottom Lordship ring, which had always sat on his grandmother’s gnarled hand, just like the Heir ring had always sat on his dad’s hand in the closed ward. 

(1997 or 1998. After he’d buried his father’s wand, he’d stayed out in the woods just long enough to make everyone worried, like Millie had told him to back at school, and maybe somewhere in there it hadn’t been about covering for the wand. Maybe somewhere in there it had become about him— will it matter if I don’t come back?)

(But he’d trudged out of the woods just after dusk, mud on his hands and knees, and his grandmother had come running across the lawn, peacoat and vulture hat and all, and swept him up in her arms, and he feels the sword in his hand and sees the plants he bred growing in the closed ward.)

I’m not afraid, he thinks, slowly sinking down to the floor, as he closes his hand around the ring and feels the phantom weight of his grandmother’s hug all those years ago. I know how to do this. 

He sits on the floor just sobbing until the light leaves. 

___________________

Putting the Ministry back together from rubble is the perfect distraction. In the tense, feverish days after the war, the four of them (and Hermione and Theo, when they can get them, with the occasional contributions from Justin) fall in-step with Ron’s brother Percy (who Ernie thinks might be a sort of kindred spirit— posh, fussy, and obsessive about the weirdest details) and Sue’s mum and do their best to fix it. Establish departments, research members of the Wizengmont, decrepit the communiques of the old regime, track down stray Death Eaters, dig out and rework old legislation. They steal sleep in small packets, on cots and couches (usually when Suze or Ginny stops by with that glint in their eyes), and if he pushes it far enough, he won’t dream. 

Rebuilding the world from the ground up is so much easier than facing the truth: his mother is dead, his dad is in a Ministry holding cell, and he’s the Heir of nothing. Can’t even get back in through the wards to figure out what to do with his mother’s body.

He makes it two weeks, in the end— sleeping mainly at the Ministry, and occasionally at Justin’s; wearing suits Justin’s mum pressed for the funerals; refreshing his knowledge on Ministry law and helping work out department politics and Wizengmont seats— before waking up from a quick nap to Daphne, Sue, and Anthony, just looking at him.

“What?” he asks, pushing himself to sitting. They’re in the room at the Ministry off their headquarters that used to be an office until Sue transfigured at few cots; by his watch it’s seven at night. Anthony is sitting on the desk chair, fidgety; Sue is twisting her hands together; Daphne is leaning against the door, trying to look slick and really just looking exhausted. Ernie flicks his gaze between the three of them; in the past year, they’ve spent a lot of time together, on research and subterfuge and just the split-knuckled business of survival, but they look nervous now, in a way that unnerves him.

“You really weren’t going to tell us your mum is dead?” asks Sue. 

Oh. Ernie blinks, and then blinks again, feeling small. What slips out is, “How did you know?”

“It was in the Prophet,” says Anthony, pulling out the latest issue and holding up the page. List of Battle of Hogwarts Dead Released, screams the headline. 

“What did you do?” asks Daphne. “You have a family plot, I assume?”

Ernie looks down at his hands— the cuts he acquired in the final battle are grooved eskers of keratin now— and explains it all to them. The notification from Flitwick. How by the time he’d gotten to the castle, the magic she’d appended to herself had already drawn the body back to the MacMillian Manor. How he’d been unable to get through the wards. 

(He can’t verbalize how much it had hurt. He’d never tried, after he’d handed the ring back when they’d demanded it, but he’d always hoped. Even when the letters had never come, even when they’d named another Heir. He’d hoped that it had meant something, all those years in the empty house, trying to earn the kind of love that everyone at Hogwarts had just thrust at him with open hands. But there he’d been, on the boundary, and the wards had been immovable, unyielding, like he was just some worthless kid.)

Silence, once he finishes. His hands are shaking on his lap. He doesn’t look up; Daphne and Sue and Anthony are many, many things, but they are not what he would call emotionally attuned. If he’d told this narrative to Justin and his mum, or Susan and Ron, or Hannah, he would have been hugged several times over now, have tea in his hand, and be generally smothered in affection, and while that’s nice sometimes, it’s also not exactly what he wants right now. This grief isn’t clean-cut, linear, like it was at the funeral for Anthony’s grandmother, everyone wiping at their eyes for a beloved matriarch and war hero. 

(He wonders if his mum has the Mark on her arm.)

“Well,” says Daphne, after a long silence. “We’re not Hermione, but between the four of us, surely we can break some shit Pureblood wards.”

They leave the legislation on the table and Ernie apparates them to the gates of the sprawling estate he grew up on, out near Ashford. It’s drizzling, and the wrought iron gates have the crest he used to wear on his hand. He thinks of his mother, what feels like a lifetime ago, taking him around the manor and showing him the details, the anchor points of the magic, the history: one day all this will be yours.

Unless I go and chose a different side, he thinks, with some hideous cross between a laugh and a scream in his throat. 

With his mother dead and his father in prison, the wards are withered, like curdled milk, and Hermione probably could have but reached out her hand and broken them. It takes the four of them fifteen minutes, of jotted transforms and coefficient substitutions, but then they’re falling in shards around them, like fine snow.

It’s bizarre, to be back; it’s more bizarre to be back with crew, with three friends who his parents would have liked until they showed all their teeth and claws. The door opens under his hand, and he stills in the foyer, suddenly unable to breathe.

“What?” asks Anthony

“They got it redone,” says Ernie, gesturing up to the huge oil painting that dominates the entrance way. When he had lived here— when he had been Heir— it had been of his whole family, him at eleven flanked by his parents. Now, his parents stand alone. 

Sue, a few feet behind him, lets out the barest hiss, and then raises her wand. She’s not the best transfigurationist in their class for nothing, and the painting ripples seamlessly before them and resolves into an oil facsimile of one of Ernie’s favorite pictures, one he has framed on the wall at Justin’s house. It’s one of Colin’s, of the study room at the Hogwarts library, when they’re all about fourteen, and he’s the only one looking at the camera— Susan is asleep against one of his shoulders, Hermione and Sue and Theo are conferring over transfig; Harry and Ginny and Ron are diagraming a Quidditch play on a blackboard. Anthony has his head down on the table next to Hannah; Millie is bickering with Daphne and Neville about some Herbology problem, and Luna is reading the Quibbler upside down, perched on the table. To see it, in oil, handing in this haunted house, is like a scene out of a dream. 

“Let’s finish this,” says Sue, stalking forward into the dusty gloom.

The find the body lying in state in the dining room. The MacMillian house elves left long ago, pacts broken and magic withdrawn, so there’s only the magic of the house to prevent rot. Anthony goes for the arm without hesitating, like the born investigator he is; Daphne thrusts out her arm to stop him. 

“Do you want to know?” she asks, her grey eyes cool and intelligent. 

(Ernie thinks about long afternoons spent learning heraldry and genealogy, just to have facts to impress her with at dinner, only for her not to show. He thinks of letters from Hogwarts that weren’t answered, and the lies in the MacMillian Codex, and the educational decrees this past school year that came from the office she was running.)

(He wants to believe she wouldn’t have drawn on him, dueled him, fought him in the final battle, but he know at heart that’s not true. None of this was ever about him.)

“You can look,” he says. “But it doesn’t really matter.”

Her forearm is pale and unmarked. She looks almost peaceful— avada, probably— and Ernie hates it, somehow. 

“Where’s the family plot?” asks Daphne, and Ernie suddenly has no desire to dig a grave. The only thing in his veins is disgust and rage, a lifetime in the making, and all he wants to do is watch it burn.

They take the body out to the back garden and pile it with brush and the pamphlets and literature they find in the house, from the wartime Department of Magical Education. He pulls down a few heavy genealogy tomes down out of spite, the ones he knows are faked. The slot on his right hand where the ring used to sit is burning. Sue Switches a stray piece of paper for her dad’s muggle lighter, presses it into his hand. He runs his finger over the L on the silver box and thinks about evenings at the Burrow, and the room at the Finch-Fletchleys with his name on the door, and talking about court cases with Sue’s parents on rainy evenings before the war, and how Anthony’s grandmother had taken him and Anthony and Sue and Hermione to the legal library in Leeds, and how even the slivers of affection from his friends’s parents had always felt like more than he received in his own house. 

He stares at his mother’s face, slack in death, beneath the brush and the books. A lifetime ago, people had said they looked alike, but Ernie has never seen it. Never will now, he supposes. 

There are no words. There is only the snick-click of the lighter as he catches the brush, the whoosh as it goes up, and the weight of his three brutal friends, standing in the twilight as the fire burns.

The words clot and flock in his blood, two weeks later when he’s waiting in the hard chairs at the Ministry to try and visit his father in the holding cells. Justin is sitting on one side; Mrs. Finch-Fletchley, who made it through Ministry security with a wand that had once belonged to some long-dead MacMillian and a complete refusal to hear the word no, is sitting on his other. 

(Anthony had slipped him the early dossiers the Ministry was preparing for the case against his father, and the charges were damning. He, too, lacked the Mark, but he’d spent the war running the Revenue Division, which had been primarily concerned with redistributing funds and items stolen from muggleborns to the Death Eaters. He’d kept ledger after ledger filled with incriminating evidence, and though he’d tried to ward them, he was still a MacMillian. Hermione was quite simply better.)

(You could get him off with some plea bargain if he copped to it all, Sue’s mum had said the other day, looking over the charges. But I doubt he will. And she’s right, Ernie knows— Ernest Clarence MacMillian II won’t go down without a fight.)

Stray thoughts tumble together in his brain like rocks in a river. Daphne had been summoned from their war council room a few nights ago, by some DLME official— they’d ID’d her father’s remains in the aftermath of the battle. Daphne, who’s mother was facing a life sentence for the Dark Mark on her arm, had told to take them to the Greenglass plot, and then looked back at Ernie, like he was any kind of compass. 

Her face, with the question. The thickets of Ministry law. Ginny and Susan dragging the four of them and Percy back to the Burrow the other evening, making them stay for a scrimmage after dinner. He’d fallen asleep on the living room floor, Justin on one side and Susan on the other and Hannah on the couch, and there had been no dreams. 

The Auror trainee— Ernie dimly recognizes him, a muggleborn he forged papers for, said he was an illegitimate son of some Rosier back in the haze of it all— comes back from the corridor leading to the holding cells and gives him an apologetic smile. “He says he has no desire to see you,” he says, and Ernie knew it was coming, and yet it still makes his chest freeze over. 

Justin presses his shoulder against his— “Sorry, mate,” he whispers, but his mum is on her feet, muggle jeans and all.

“Tell him he’s a fucking fool, will you?” she says. “Boys, let’s go home.”

So they go back to Reading, on the train. The bungalow by the railroad tracks is studded in Hermione’s wards, like an empire, and Ernie sees the gates with the crest, and the letters from his father telling him to make political connections, and how he never asked the names of his friends. Thinks of the long empty table in the manor, where he’d so often ate alone, or just sat waiting. 

“Welcome home,” says Justin, and his mum turns on all the lights and begins to pull down tomatoes, spices, skillets, and outside the train horns, and he just sits at the table and stares at his hands, at the small scars they accumulated in the course of the war, and tries, with all he has in him, to catch his breath. 

___________________

(Later, the Selwyns will discover the guerrilla grave in their cemetery, but they’re no match for the triptych of Hermione, Flitwick, and Fleur’s wards. Ron will go with the twins sometimes, when the moon is a fingernail and the grief is running high, and pour one out for him, up in the moors. The twins will leave pickpocketed trinkets, and Ron will remember the nights in Grimmauld where it almost felt like a home with him there, and how the silver raccoon of his patronus would scuttle in, give them updates.)

(Later, he’ll go with Susan to visit the graves that belong to her— three in a plot out in Woking— and with Harry to his, and with Neville to his, but they never bring the children, not until they’re old enough for Hogwarts. They’ll have heard the stories, of course, about grandmothers and grandfathers and great-aunts and Lily Evans Potter and James Potter and how they’re the reason they have Uncle Harry, but it’s all different, out in the graveyard, the grass rustling in the wind. Ron will crouch to eye-level, look his daughters in the eyes, and tell it like it is. They would have loved you, he’ll say, thinking about Amelia Bones’s laugh and the picture from the fridge in Woking of Susan with her parents that is now on their fridge. And sometimes, love is living, and sometimes, love is dying.)

(In the future, Neville with weigh the seat in the Wizengmont his Lordship ring could buy him, and turn away. But when Ernie informs him about his ability to appoint someone to sit in it for him, he won’t think, not for a single minute, about power or politics. He only thinks about a house where he was always welcomed, and for years and years the Longbottom seat is occupied by one Arthur Weasley.)

(The Longbottom manor won’t stop feeling like a haunted house until there are children to bring home to it. But in the summers, they come back from Hogwarts and throw open all the windows and host dinner parties, birthday parties, and Luna paints murals for all the kids on their bedroom walls, and Ginny teaches them how to fly. It will feels like a home, then, with Harry sitting on the back stoop like a brother, and Hermione asleep on the chaise with a book on her chest, and Ron giving children who can’t see the thestrals, who hopefully never will be able to see the thestrals, a leg up onto the back of them.)

(Still to come: in three years, Ernie will be back at the Finch-Fletchley’s for Christmas, and Justin’s mum will tell him and Justin to open their presents at the same time. Inside are a matching pair of gold signet rings, with intricately interwoven Fs. Figured we might as well have a fake crest to go with our fake house, she’ll say, and Ernie will die with that ring on his hand. The MacMillian estate will hang in political limbo for decades, but late one night when they’re all twenty-two, him and Susan and Justin and Hannah will get a little too drunk and break in and steal only that portrait Sue transfigured on a whim, in the wane days after the war ended. They’ll hang it in their flat in Glasgow, and then Ernie will hang it in his quarters at Hogwarts, and he never wanted the manor anyway.)

(His mother is dead, and his father will never talk to him again. But years later, standing up in front of the History of Magic class at forty, looking the first years in eyes, he’ll draw that version of his family tree, and then erase it and draw a new one: a mother, a brother, a sister-in-law, nieces and nephews, and then shining lines to Susan and Hannah and Ron and the rest of the family he’s stumbled into. This isn’t a class about genealogy and bloodlines and pure-blood nonsense, he’ll tell them. This is a class about choices.)

(And years and years later, they won’t go to funerals. They’ll go to weddings, in the sun-drenched May sunlight, Arthur Weasley walking Susan down the aisle; Hannah in a white ballgown dancing with Theo, with Ernie, with Luna at the reception, everyone laughing. They’ll go to baby showers— eventually, everyone will just accept that Hermione will turn up with textbooks as presents for infants— and Little League Quidditch matches, and to the train to see children not theirs off to Hogwarts.)

(And every July, they’ll go to the joint birthday party, stay up to midnight until Harry and Neville blow out their candles together, and it won’t be about Chosen Ones or as the seventh month dies or legacies or Lordships. Just two friends, and their friends, shit-faced in the dark, the world no longer theirs to save.)

Chapter Text

“Do you want to come the cave with me?” 

It’s the end of May; he’s at Lake District alone for the evening, while Hermione has dinner with her parents and Ron take Susan out for a proper date. The rain slicks down the windows in long streaks, and Snape is sitting at the other end of the sofa, one leg folded under him, reading a potions journal. It’s been over a fortnight, of whatever the hell they’re doing— the bedroom in the attic, the pictures Snape had produced from thin air and put up on the walls, the careful way he makes dinner— and Harry still doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Lake District feels like home, in a way Grimmauld didn’t even with Sirius there, but it still feels wrong, somehow. 

He knows Snape’s patronus is him, and that all along somehow it’s been love, but the concept is too large to grasp, skittering away from him like a fish from an open hand.

(They won. Snape is here, because Ron saved his life, and he was always on their side. There are the dead, sure, but it wasn’t Theo or Neville or Susan or Ginny; wasn’t Ron or Hermione. Snape put pictures on the walls, and bought him new trainers and shirts at the department store in London, awkward and on-edge but there, and makes him tea when he has a nightmare, like he matters and what the fuck is he supposed to with all that?)

(Sirius made sense, at least. His father’s best friend, his godfather. He’d tried his best as a guardian, even though Azkaban had clearly messed him up and he’d never really been cut out for raising a child. Which was fine, because Harry didn’t need raising. He just needed to live somewhere that wasn’t the Dursleys, and be fed, and maybe have someone to send a letter to sometimes. Someone to go get takeout with, and tell him it wasn’t his fault that they were dead, and understand that all of this the whole time had been about Ron and Hermione.)

He’s wanted this for the past six years, he thinks, even if he wasn’t ready to admit it at the beginning. Certainly since Chelsea. Just— a house that was his. A couch to curl up and read on, a garden to fly in. Somewhere he could invite Ron and Hermione to. 

(He’s wanted Snape. Snape, with his heavy gaze and black muggle cardigans and paranoia, making dinner and muttering sarcastic comments about the quality of the articles in Brewer’s Monthly. Snape, getting up quickly when he came in from the moors with blood on his face from a bad fall, like it matters that he’s hurt.)

And it’s all here now, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. 

Four nights after the battle, he’d gone back to Hogwarts with Ron and Hermione. Kreacher had apparated them right into the main hall, where they’d been met by McGonagall and Sprout and Flitwick and the acting head of the House Elf Union, Olyana. He’d still been exhausted, all the way down to the bones; Hermione had just gotten back from Australia and Ron was wearing one of Bill’s old Unicorns jumpers because Mrs. Weasley had condemned all their clothes. Not that their professors had looked much better— McGonagall had clearly reopened wounds in the fight; Flitwick was smaller and frailer looking that Harry remembered him being; and Sprout looked like she hadn’t slept in months. 

The Union had dragged the body into a broom closet off the side of the Great Hall. Olyana undid the magic on the door with a wave, and then the seven of them had just stared at it for a long moment. After all of this, there he was, stone-cold dead, and it had felt unreal. The long scar on Harry’s forearm that had never quite healed right burned faintly, and Ron reached over for his hand. On his other side, Hermione shifted slightly, so to press her shoulder against his. 

“Well, Mr. Potter,” said McGonagall after a long moment. “What do you want to do with it?” 

Little Hangleton had been chilly, even in May, and the last colors from the sunset were streaked across the sky when they apparated to the graveyard. In the distance rose the decaying Riddle House, and the way Ron and Hermione shifted their stances, prepared for a fight, stilled something inside of Harry. The gravestone Wormtail had bound him against was still there, Tom Marvolo Riddle gleaming in the twilight. In the low light, Voldemort’s unnaturally pale skin seemed to almost glow. 

Flitwick and McGonagall and Sprout summoned and transfigured and switched in wood; Hermione set up anti-flame wards and perimeters, and Ron didn’t let go of his hand. Harry looked down at Voldemort’s noseless face and saw the cauldron, and Cedric dead in the grass, and how the dead had come back in volo and before then, in the priori in the graveyard. 

When the pyre had been done, brush covering the body, Hermione pressed a muggle lighter from foldspace into his hand. He’d known it by feel: it had been Sirius’s, lifted from Grimmauld in September.

There had been nothing to say, though Olyana had made a rude hand gesture. He’d just flicked the lighter open and sent the pyre up in a pillar of fire. 

After that, it had been three weeks of the kind of funerals where there were words: Bath with the Goldsteins; the guerrilla burial in the Selwyn plot for Mundungus; Neville’s grandmother’s funeral; Aunt Muriel’s out in the tall weeds. It’s still hard to keep food down when it’s not Snape’s or Mrs. Weasley’s or Fleur’s, and in the dreams Hermione stays dead on the beach, Ron stays dead in the snow, Snape bleeds out in the shack—

And it’s not that important, the cave in the cleft of rock by the North Sea and the unburied body of the man they owe all this to, except it is, viscerally, in a way he can’t explain.

Snape lowers his potions journal and tilts his head, his eyes sharp. The scar across his throat from the snake is a coil, and his voice is still raspy. “The cave?”

“Where he hid the horcrux,” says Harry. “With the inferni.”

Snape’s gaze sharpens. “You want to retrieve his body.”

Harry nods. 

“You intend to bring Weasley and Granger, I assume?” Snape says; Harry nods again. He puts his journal to the side and sits up, flexing his hand. “You fought inferni on your quest?” 

“No,” says Harry, thinking of the black lake and the pale faces of the dead and Cedric dead in the grass. “Just— just that one time with Dumbledore.”

“Elaborate,” says Snape, steepling his fingers together, his focus intent. Harry takes a deep breath, forcing his mind back to the before— the entire night in his memory is fractured in two by the lawn fight. He sits on the arm of the sofa and looks at his hands and tells Snape about the cleft in the rock, and the blood on the stone, and the lake and the boat and the dead. 

Outside, the wind is picking up, and Harry runs out of words— Snape knows about what happened on the tower, and on the lawn, and it’s been a year and the words are still a brand in his mind. Snape stands to pace, and Harry picks at the hem of the new shirt Snape bought him, words echoing in his head like they have for the last year: in the dark you look just like your awful father; who would want you when they could have her; I can’t imagine why anyone would bother dying for you. They haven’t talked about the lawn, and Harry doesn’t even know how he would start that conversation. 

His patronus is me, he didn’t mean it, Harry tells himself, watching Snape move like a shadow, and he believes it and yet also cannot bring himself to in the same breath. 

Snape comes to a halt behind the couch, braces his hands on it. “Between the four of us, I think we could accomplish it, but if you would permit me to bring in some more… assistance… it would certainly be safer.”

There’s a thing to how he’s standing that mean if Harry says no, he won’t do it, and Harry almost wants to say it just to see his nod, just to prove it to himself. Somewhere in all of this, the yawning crevasse of want that’s followed him around since he realized he wasn’t a member of the Dursley family has widened into an abyss and he wants everything. Dinners and pictures on the wall and a ring with a family crest and and and—

“Harry?” Snape asks, and Harry snaps himself back to the present. It’s still so strange to hear Snape say his name, but he loves it with his entire being. 

“Who?” he asks. 

And so that’s how he and Ron and Hermione find themselves in the driving rain and surf of the North Sea with Severus Snape and Minerva McGonagall and Narcissa Malfoy. Stray lightning cracks across the sky, and Narcissa is pale and bony, but shakes Hermione and Ron’s hands warmly. “Didn’t know Snape had friends, mate,” whispers Ron, and despite what they’re here to do, Harry can’t help but crack a smile, and even McGonagall looks taken aback at the casualness with which Hermione casts a suite of complex anti-Inferni wards.

(Hermione doesn’t forget to cast warming charms on him and Ron against the bone-cold sea. Treading water in the dark, Harry thinks about when they and Millie and the twins taught him to swim before the second task, and dragging Ron and Hermione’s bodies to the surface, and how Dumbledore had never seemed to care much what damage he took, just that they won.)

On the rock that requires blood, Snape makes as if to cut his hand, but Narcissa gets there first, the dagger shining in the gloom. “I don’t want to see your blood ever again, Severus,” says McGonagall, and Harry has to agree even as the rock splits open. Hermione has her hand out, feeling the magic; Ron is a constant on his other side, wand drawn and eyes peeled. 

The lake, in the gloom, the dark water rippling slightly. The illuminated island where the locket once had sat. Narcissa hisses through her teeth; McGonagall looks appalled; Snape looks resigned. Hermione has her head tilted, intrigued. “Creepy fucker,” whispers Ron. 

“Well, Miss Granger?” asks McGonagall. “What do you make of his mess?”

Hermione licks her lips, looking around the cavern. Her hair is pulled back, and her cheeks are still a little hollow, but she’s wearing a heavy cloak that Sue transfigured for her and a Harpies jumper that absolutely was Ginny’s at one point, and there’s a spark in her eyes. “It’s impressive,” she says. “But it’s not infallible.”

Narcissa laughs. “If I’d wanted him to win, I would have convinced him to recruit you,” she says. 

“It never would have worked,” says Snape, his eyes on the water, his wand drawn.

“I could have faked a family tree,” says Narcissa, a little indignant.

Yeah, but it was never about that, Harry thinks, looking at Hermione; he can tell by the look on Ron’s face that he’s thinking the same thing. 

“And what,” says Snape quietly. “Could the Dark Lord have offered her that she doesn’t already have?”

Oh, he understands, Harry thinks, something warm splitting open in his chest, and Hermione tries and fails to keep an astonished grin off her face, and Ron turns back to him with a look that just says mate! and Harry thinks of how Snape has finally, finally started to call them his friends and understands, all at once, that he’s always known what they mean to him.

The magic of the cavern folds like wet paper under Hermione’s deft touch, as the rest of them scramble to help her, fighting off inferni with flashes of magic. Each hitch they undo seems to take weight from the cave, lessen the hideous bleed of dark magic into the air, and one by one the bodies float free to the surface of the lake, inferni no longer. 

Muggles, most of them. Uninvolved, not good not evil, dead because of Voldemort. Harry looks at their faces and tries to burn them into his mind, for Anthony later when the aftermath of the war simmers lower and he gets around to closing open muggle missing person reports. But some of them, Harry recognizes from the timeline that used to hang in the library, and Snape and Narcissa recognize more, and McGonagall most of all, her gasps and sighs of grief in the cave like knives. 

And then there he is. Pale and water-logged and very dead, but with Sirius’s nose and the Mark on his arm. He shuts his eyes, thinking about Grimmauld and the Other Chinese Place and how this had been the exit, and he understood then and he understands now, in his teeth, and suddenly he can’t seem to breathe—

Ron’s hand in his. Hermione’s arm over his shoulder. He opens his eyes, and Snape is kneeling in front of the body, covering it with his cloak, his movements jerky with grief.

“Come on, mate,” says Ron, and he didn’t realize he was shaking. “Snape and them can handle it, yeah?”

It’s raining at Lake District, and Hermione goes into the house and comes back out with liquor. They sit on the back steps and let it soak into them. 

“I saw him, on the other side,” Harry says, finally. Somewhere in all the mess of the victory and Snape and survival, they hadn’t gotten there yet. Piece by piece, trading the bottle, he gets the story out. “He wasn’t talking to Snape, he wasn’t talking to Sirius, he just— couldn’t see any exits,” says Harry, rainwater dripping down his face. Ron’s hand is warm on his shoulder blade. 

“He— he invented volo, though,” says Hermione, softly. 

“It wasn’t enough,” says Harry, staring at the dirt and seeing only the cupboard and the walls of the tent and the letter from Dumbledore. 

The rain. The liquor is shit but it’s getting the job done. 

“We’d come get you, though, mate,” says Ron, after a long minute. “We’d always come get you.”

“We had plans, you know,” says Hermione, taking a pull from the bottle. “I— I memorized the train routes from Birmingham to Survey after first year. So that if— if someone tried to send you back I could just come get you.”

“I had the twins in on it,” says Ron. “They were going to set off some explosion to distract mum and I’d get the Knight Bus.” 

He doesn’t realize he’s crying until the hot tears drip down into the dirt.

When Snape comes back from the cave, wiping at his face and missing a cloak, he takes one look at the tableau of them— soaked through, stolen liquor and obviously sobbing— and flicks out his hand to cast warming and drying charms. “Give me that,” he says, tugging the bottle from Hermione’s hand. “I’ve got better shit than this, and Reg would have wanted us to get drunk in style.”

The dusk bleeds into the dark. Ron holds back Hermione’s hair as she throws up in the bushes. Snape gets even quieter after a few, and Harry has just enough awareness to grasp that the fact he would drink in front of them is trust of the highest order. But that’s too much to think about, really, so Harry just puts his forehead against Snape’s arm and senses rather than sees the distant forms of his crew. “I saw him over there. On— on the other side. At the Chinese place in Chelsea,” he murmurs; Snape stills. “He told me to tell you he loved you. Sorry I couldn’t bring him back.”

Snape’s hand is heavy in his hair. “It’s alright, Harry,” he says quietly. 

“I love you too, y’know,” says Harry. Snape lets out a shuddering kind of sigh that seems to go down to the water table, and Hermione throws up again, and Snape’s hand doesn’t leave his hair. 

It feels like a dream, like all those years ago when he woke up in the Hospital wing after the debacle with the stone and Snape was there. But it’s not a dream, Snape’s raspy voice going “I love you too,” and Kreacher will want to bury Regulus in some cursed Black graveyard and they’ll make it happen and of course Ron and Hermione would come find him, that’s what he’d do for them. And maybe he’s shit at the after part of all this, but goddamn he wants to be here, red-eyed and drunk on Snape’s stoop with his best mates throwing up in the bushes, with all he has in him. 

________________

In the aftermath of the battle, Theo had ended up in the Slytherin common room, asleep on the floor next to Daphne, worn through and elated and with blood on his teeth, and when he’d woken up it had been to Astoria declaring he was coming home with them. 

Them turned out to the Creevys, because Daphne had gone to the Ministry with Sue and Ernie and Anthony to try to fix things, and had deputized Astoria. “Don’t get slippery on me, Theo,” Astoria had said, eyes bright and hair pulled back, still in her uniform, and she looked just like Daphne had when they’d walked up from the train after the resurrection and she’d told him they’d always back him. No blood in her hair, on her fists, and as the weight of the night caught up with him he realized there never would be, not for this war. 

He hadn’t had it in him to argue, not after everything. He slept for most of the train ride, and the Creevys themselves had come to King’s Cross, blue-bloods though they were, and Theo had been reminded of the Malfoys until they’d started hugging their children. “And who is this?” Lord Creevy had asked, and Theo had started to draw together the persona he’d worn his whole life, of a pureblood from a good house who’s name meant something, and then Astoria had gone, “My sister’s best friend,” and Colin had gone, “Dad, he’s who I was telling you about at Christmas. Our Head Boy.” 

“Oh, Theo,” Lord Creevy had said, and Theo had expected a handshake and gotten a hug. 

He’s never been in a car before (only heard copious stories about how wrong Ron’s dad’s experiment with it had gone), but he had enough magic left for a shrinking charm and Colin, who’d apparently gone back to fight like a bloody idiot (couldn’t expect more from the Gryffindors, he supposed), falls asleep against his shoulder, hex damage on his hands and blood in his hair. As if through honey, he has the thought that maybe he should have more protests about this arrangement. But Dennis keeps interrupting Astoria’s stories only to receive an elbow, and Lady Creevy keeps on trying to include him in the conversations in the way only a socialite would, by asking about his family and pedigree. 

(He doesn’t tell her they’re both dead and actually he saw both of those deaths and only one matters to him. He talks about Daphne, and Millie, and Harry and Ron and Hermione, and what he hopes to get a Mastery in.)

Maybe there’s simply no space for fear, in a car with two muggles and Astoria and Dennis and Colin. On his finger the Nott ring is humming with the Trio’s magic, like a door; if he didn’t want to go to the Burrow, he could apparate out and kip in some muggle motel for a few days until Hedwig showed up. Hell, he could disarm everyone in this car with ease. 

But he’s spent the last year— the last three years— his whole life— terrified beyond measure, and now suddenly it’s all over, like a dam breach. His father is dead, the Dark Lord is dead, and everyone he loves is alive, and he just wants to sleep.

The Creevy estate is all rolling grass, butlers, wide marble staircases. No fucking peacocks and none of that haunting hum of dark magic, and the guest room in the east wing is probably seldom used but is immaculately kept, and one of the staff brings him a change of clothes and instructs him in the operation of the muggle shower. 

He sleeps, wakes, sleeps again, until it’s Daphne there, hair pulled back, wearing muggle clothes, and sitting on the side of the bed. A late afternoon sunbeam has her caught in it’s maw and it could have been twelve hours or it could have been forty and Theo doesn’t particularly care either way. 

“Daph?” he asks, shoving himself upright. 

“Thought you would have bailed,” she says, reaching up to shifts some stray bedhead out of the way. “You never do what I tell you to do.”

“Where would I have gone, Daph?” he asks. 

She shrugs. “You’ve got exits plans inside of exit plans, Theo.”

And that had been true, once, hadn’t it? Faint memories of safe house designs, and warding packages, and burning manors blur together in his mind with the portkey from the Trio and the Come-and-Go Room and Daphne herself, how he knows she would rise from any table and back his play. He leans forward, until his forehead is against the point of her shoulder; she puts a hand in his hair and begins to tease out the snarls. 

“Not anymore,” he says. “And I didn’t need them anyway.”

A long moment of silence. Daphne smells like dark magic and ink and there’s a weight to her that is like a sister. “My father’s dead,” she says, toneless; she’s never talked much about her parents, but Theo can read between the lines well enough to know that whatever she feels for them, it isn’t love. “My mother’s in Ministry custody. Probably life. I— it’s just me and Astoria, now.”

“And me,” says Theo, raising his head, indignant. “And Millie, and Susan, and the Trio, and the Creevys, for Merlin’s sake— you’re not just going to be alone in the world, Daph.”

They stare at each other for a moment, two functional orphans, and then they’re holding each other.

They go to funerals, after that. The service for Daphne’s father is small— it’s for ‘Storia, she’d told him, the night before when they’re out back of the Creevys, who don’t seem to mind if they move in. Colin’s dad favors expensive muggle liquor and Theo can taste Daphne’s wards over the property, like pewter and snow. I don’t give two shits but they were close. Faint memories, of some drunken tell-all over Christmas Hols swirl back to the forefront of his mind—    Astoria can separate it. Like they might believe awful stuff but they’re still our parents. I just— my mum’s got the Mark, and probably helped kill our friends’s parents. Why would the small scale matter? They bury him deep in the loam out back of the Greenglass house, Astoria sobbing into Dennis’s shoulder and Daphne staring at the ring on her finger, like she’s trying to make up her mind. 

Neville’s grandmother’s, embracing their friend in the receiving line, like it’s always been this easy to declare loyalty. Anthony’s grandmother’s, in the cemetery in Bath, and when Sue’s too weepy to transfigure handkerchiefs, Theo does it, working off her methods. The memorial service for Susan’s aunt, no body to bury; Warrington’s, standing next to Harry in a muggle graveyard in Stevenage while his parents weep. Through all of, the long expanse of May, the body that’s his to bury lies unclaimed in the Ministry of Magic morgue, and he knows if he doesn’t go get it they’ll burn it for him. And if he doesn’t claim the ashes eventually they’ll just vanish into the labyrinthian halls so that only Anthony will be able to find them. 

(He keeps replaying that night over and over. The confrontation. The beginning of the torture curse. The green light. How neither Daph or Suze had hesitated, like for years and years they’d just had need enough for it, waiting. Like somehow that need was just how dare you hurt our friend?)

(He doesn’t want the body. He doesn’t want a grave out back of a haunted house. No monuments to men he’s wanted dead since he was six. Just Susan and Daphne, pulling him to his feet in the courtyard.)

(They hadn’t even hesitated and maybe it’s a fucked-up kind of love language, but he carries it with him all the same.)

At the end of the May, the owl from the Ministry comes— final notice, claim or else— and he sets it alight without trying in the bedroom of the Creevy Estate. Daphne, in between rebuilding the world from inside the Ministry, has filed for custody of Astoria, and has managed to secure the Greenglass Estate in Coventry by making a new pact with the elves. Once we fix the Ministry, we can redo it on our own terms, she’d said a few nights ago. If you have a suite and Millie has a suite and maybe Anthony too, it won’t feel haunted. 

And it’s true, Theo supposes, thinking of the wide lawns and the fountains. At the core, Coventry is a lovely house, with massive libraries and powerful elves and beautiful vistas. There’s a certain wholeness to what Daphne is proposing— remaking a place she so often felt alone into somewhere for all of them.

But he has no intention of doing that with Nott Manor. 

It’s raining, in Leeds, as he apparates them past the wards; long, slick lines like an oil spill. Daphne raises her hand to incant rain protection charms over them, for the long walk up to the house, but Luna gets there first, and so the seven of them walk up the lawn with pink umbrellas and Theo feels a kind of vicious glee at how much his father would hate this. A Weasley and a Longbottom and a Lovegood and a Bones and what had the Bulstrodes ever done for the Dark Lord, fleeing to France— 

Nothing for the Dark Lord, Theo thinks, looking over at Millie, who is still weak and slightly shaky even weeks out from her encounter with the Hogwarts ring. But a lot for me.

The Trio would have come if he’d asked them, he knows. Hermione would have looted the libraries bare and gone toe-to-toe with the darker of the wards; Ron would have scowled at the all the paintings of his ancestors and Harry would have lurked in his footsteps, a shadow who understood. They would have come if he’d asked them, and so he didn’t. This is rebellion work, and so he’s brought a different crew. 

The dark magic infecting the house hits like a punch to the gut, and Ginny recoils with a hiss. “You grew up in this shit, Theo?” she asks, turning to him; she’s got her hair pulled back and is still wearing her brand-new gear the Harpies put up for workouts. 

“After my mother died, yes,” says Theo, shoving aside a decade and more of memories and crossing the threshold anyway. Luna incants floating lights, which illuminate the once-pristine entry hall. The house reeks of blood and rot and dark magic. 

“The elves abandoned your father?” Luna asks. 

“I can only assume,” he says, gritting his teeth. On his other side, Neville has his wand out, holding himself like a warrior. 

“Are you sure about this, Theo?” Susan asks softly, staring at the smears of blood on the marble. 

“There’s nothing for me here,” says Theo, and he means it with all he has in him, like an avada. “Take what you want, and we’ll burn the rest.”

He lets his friends loose on what once had been his father’s pride and joy. Daphne deputizes herself and goes to the library; Ginny and Neville peel off to the farthest, spookiest corners, looking for things beyond the pale. Susan and Luna split— flame ward on the rose garden, says Luna, and Theo feels a tremendous swell of love for her— and Millie is just gone, into the firmaments, taking, like she always does. 

Theo goes up to the room that had been his, before Hogwarts. The framed family tree burns cleanly under his touch; the crest on the bedsheets go the same way. He stands at the window for a long moment, looking out over the grounds, the rain lashing the trees, and sees through the deluge Susan and Luna’s pink umbrellas bobbing in the gloom.

All the pictures he has of his mother are tucked in his trunk, protected with Hermione’s best wards. His wand is on his wrist; his friends are here, or at the Burrow, or at the Ministry, rebuilding things. The manor is just an empty shell, bleeding dark magic and fear. 

Daphne takes pretty much every volume in the library, shoved into an undetectable-extension charm bag. Ginny and Neville return with a bit of blood on them but grinning like mad, and Millie returns with several bags of galleons, dropping them on the table one after the other. “Maybe the Nott estate can fund the rebuilding effort,” she says.

Luna comes back with a rose from the bush over his mother’s shrine, thorns vanished, and tucks it carefully in his hair. Susan gives him a hug, dense, grounding, and if he could take one thing with him, he’d choose that.

Ginny and Neville have already started in with the muggle accelerants. Daphne has enough books to keep Hermione occupied for a few months. There’s nothing here for Theo, hasn’t been for more than decade. Ginny hands him the Molotov cocktail, and he stares at the stern portrait his father commissioned of himself, where the portrait magic hadn’t taken because he’d let the Ministry burn the body. He lights the wick with just a flash of magic, as instinctive as it comes, and throws it.  

They stand on the ward boundary and watch it burn against the rain, jagged tongues of fire rising up like waves. Ginny is grinning, manic crime lord that she is, and Susan takes his hand. The rose in his hair smells like his mother did, a lifetime ago, and he wonders what she would think of the man he’s become. At the very end, when she knew she was dying and he had hardly left her side, she had apologized for leaving him alone, as if it had been her choice.

On his arm, the place where the Dark Mark would have sat is blank, as it will be forever, because they won, and the ring on his finger is burning with the Trio’s magic. I’m not alone, he thinks, with the friends he’d never thought he’d have rayed out on his sides, watching the ancestral Nott house burn to the ground. 

And for the first time in as long as he can remember, there’s no fear in his chest, just a feral, pacing joy. 

________________

She finds Hermione where she knew she’d find her: out back of the Burrow by Sirius’s shrine, turning her wand in her hands. Luna makes her steps loud on purpose, and whistles a little, because all three of them are jumpy (why wouldn’t they be?) and she doesn’t want the drama and guilt of being laid out with a stunner right now. Hermione looks up as she approaches, instead of falling into a battle stance, and Luna sits down beside her. “Want some company?” she asks, though she already knows the answer. But Hermione likes being asked. 

Hermione just nods, and Luna leans back into the heels of her hands and watches the swallows flit high above them in the late May blue.

It all still feels like a thing out of a dream, the idea that somehow they did it. That all of it is just over. She’s heard the story in pieces from Ron and Hermione and Harry over the past few weeks, enough to build out the details between. The whole thing with the Horcruxes made too much sense— of course, she hadn’t known magic could get that dark, just splitting your soul (even the thought makes her shiver in the summer sun)— but it was exactly the sort of nonsense Voldemort would have loved. What did a monster like that know of souls anyway?

Far more interesting than that story is the story about how all along Snape was on Harry’s side, and so their side by default. Luna has turned over the pieces six ways to Sunday in the fortnight and change since the battle and come up with nothing— maybe the man is always destined to be an enigma to her— but Harry said he saw the patronus and she believes him. Some things can’t be faked, after all, and if Snape really has that much love for Harry just lying around, good for him. 

(Poor Dumbledore, though. Locked in a life-long battle with Voldemort, only to fall prey to the irresistible siren of The Quest, which apparently Voldemort hadn’t even heard of, and had cursed The Ring with the kind of dark thing only he could. He asked him to kill him, Ron had explained to them all, when they’d been sitting in the kitchen. It was killing him. Snape bought him the year, but even he couldn’t stop that kind of magic. Luna feels for him, betrayed by a basal hunger at the most inopportune moment, and also rages against him. For letting Snape stage his death as a betrayal, for leaving Harry at that house, for the letter.)

Ron had explained it, that night after he’d returned, halfway through a third helping of Fleur’s meatloaf, and both her and Ginny had been on their feet, distraught. You mean to say, Ginny had said, low and venomous, like she would resurrect the Dark Lord herself just to get to kill him personally, that all this time he’s had a piece of that fucker’s soul in him? Mrs. Weasley had been too stunned to correct her language, and Luna had been thinking about the visions, and the unnatural rage Harry had felt sometimes fifth year, and how the scar had never stayed closed, and even as Ron held out his hands— it didn’t come back when Harry came back, he’s alright, it’s just him now— Luna had felt her heart racing in her chest. What kind of untold damage has this splinter wrought on her friend all these years? 

And then Ron had explained the letter, and any semblance of calm had completely vanished from the kitchen. Mrs. Weasley and Ginny were both wearing an expression that promised violence; Fleur let out a furious hiss; Susan was on her feet too, along with Neville and the twins; even Viktor looked incensed— why did he not just tell Hermione, she would have figured it out, which, absolutely true— and it was all Luna could do to look at Ron. 

So he did die, she said softly, and the kitchen went quiet, as Ron ran a shaking hand through his hair. 

Yeah, he’d said, and Ginny had let out something that could have been a scream and could have been a sob. But he came back. We brought him back. 

Sitting in the tall grass, waiting for Hermione to be ready to talk, she thinks yet again of what Harry told her about his conversation on the Other Side. It had been right here, after the burial, which had apparently been in some cursed Black graveyard that they only escaped alive because Kreacher didn’t hate them anymore. It had been raining and Harry had been staring at his hands but she could see in his stance that it didn’t want to be alone. I think you would have liked him, he’d said, after the entire story had come out, about the locket in the cave and sending Kreacher back and exits and volo and the Other Chinese place. 

Luna had taken Harry’s hand in the grass, and thought about the soft gold of the magic that had filled the Great Hall, and Kreacher, and where, on the Other Side, she would have met her mother. The fallow meadow behind her house, probably. Or maybe on the fringes of the Forbidden Forest, where she’d go to feed the thestrals. Maybe on the Other Side the Thestrals were more like real horses. She’d seen pictures of Regulus on Anthony’s timeline, Auror Office surveillance stills and Hogwarts yearbook pictures, but wants to know what he sounded like when he laughed. He’s out of reach, his choices foreign to her— taking the Mark, the counter, the exit— but maybe in the same room with him, she could have pried them from his frame. Yes, she’d said. I think I would. 

Hermione had been over there, and Ron too; Ron had alluded to it, but there’s something to how they hold themselves now, and Luna can just tell. Who did they talk to, she wonders, before softly shoving her curiosity away. They have years and year to unpack what happened in those nine months they didn’t see the Trio, to hear all those stories. Hermione will talk about it when she’s ready to talk about it (some late-night tell-all, Luna foresees, after an exhausting month when her guard is down) and so will Ron (when she’s upset, and Ron thinks something from what happened over there will make her feel better), and there’s a quiet comfort to it. 

Hermione lets out a long sigh and rubs at the spot on her arm where the word Bellatrix cut into her is. She’s wearing an old Weasley sweater that Luna distantly places as George’s, and her hair is a rat’s nest. “Do you really think it would make it better?” she asks quietly. A few nights ago, Luna had come into the broom shed and found Hermione frantically attempting to glamour over the word carved into her forearm. Bellatrix’s magic was still sticky even with the distance of death, but Death Eater sorcery was no match for a sharpie. She’d sat on the floor with Hermione’s forearm propped on her knee and drawn an elaborate otter right over the hideous word, which had made Hermione grin, and then start asking about magical tattoos. 

“You probably would still be able to see it,” Luna says; Hermione nods. “But you could decenter it. So when people see it, they see something else first.”

Hermione nods. Luna thinks about the shop a little ways into Knockturn, which Sirius had shown them the summer after fourth year. Some of them are muggle, but I got all the magical ones here, he’s said, and she and the twins and Ginny had all been thrilled (which, looking back, was probably why he told them.)

“Could you— could you sketch something for me?” Hermione asks, and Luna feels something in her chest seize up in joy. She reaches out for Hermione’s hand, grinning.

“Of course,” she says. “Always.”

So as May turns to June, they find themselves in Knockturn, the bell on the door jangling and a new sign in the window declaring proudly WE’RE OPEN NOW THAT IT’S OVER. The aging proprietor, who Luna thinks Ernie forged papers for somewhere in the middle of the year, clearly recognizes her and Hermione, but doesn’t say anything, just gives them a warm smile as Luna hands over her sketch and Hermione settles herself in the chair, rolls up her sleeves, asking questions about the magic behind the tattoos to cover her nerves. 

Septimius pauses when he sees the word on her arm, sees the placement of the tattoo. “Bellatrix?” he asks softly, and Hermione stills, and then nods. The old man undoes the button on his shirt and rolls up his sleeves, revealing decades of ink work and over all of it, cut into the skin and burning, the same word. 

“You lot ended it, though,” he says, looking up at Luna briefly— that final duel against Bellatrix is just flashes of color and light in her mind, before Neville’s avada, bought with a lifetime of need— “This one’s on the house.”

Hermione holds Luna’s hand the entire time, and Luna tells her and Septimius about the celebratory issue of the Quibbler (she’s been working very hard on her twelve page comic insert detailing how all along the power the Dark Lord knows not was friendship and also having a nose.)

“What do you think, lass?” asks Septimius, putting down the needle at long last, and Hermione and Luna both stare down at the tattoo together. Larger than just the word, it encompasses her forearm, where in another life (where Voldemort got his shit together) a Dark Mark would have sat. But it’s no Mark— it’s the triptych of otter, beagle, and one-antlered stag, done in a shimmering patronus silver, shifting as if in a breeze. The word is still visible, underneath the silver, but it no longer dominates.

“I love it,” says Hermione, running her fingers gently over the piece, and Luna feels a great swell of satisfaction settle in her stomach. 

They apparate back to the Burrow and show it off— it is beautiful, Hermione, says Fleur; wicked, says Fred; oh, dearie, says Mrs. Weasley, before pulling Hermione into a close embrace. On the clock, all their hands are pointed towards home. 

Ron and Harry can’t stop staring at it all through dinner, and Luna wonders how long it will be before they too end up in Septimius’s shop, getting her art inked on their arms. Thought you were just going to get the otter, like Luna did for you the other day, says Ron, and Hermione just looks at him. Don’t be stupid, she says. It’s always all of us. 

She and Neville walk back across the fields to her house after dinner, the stars wheeling above them. She’s slowly growing used to the magic emanating from the Longbottom ring on his finger, but other than that, his presence is familiar in the dark, like an oath. 

“I’ll come with you to St. Mungo’s tomorrow,” she says, slipping her hand into his. “And then we can go to Kew.” He doesn’t say anything, but squeezes her hand back, and in front of them the crooked shape of her house rises up against the purple sky.

The elves invite her to the memorial services for Vityok and Polly and Ollie and she sobs thick tears in the graveyard out in the depths of the Forbidden Forest. Justin invites her to visit unis with him and they walk circles in the grey light, hands on stone, reaching for futures that still feel like cons. Theo turns up at her house at one in the morning, soaked through and with wild eyes, and after enough tea and warming charms, he eventually admits it’s the anniversary, and she just holds him. Anthony and Sue, in between rebuilding the world, start a running joke about how the only one who deserves an Order of Merlin is Hedwig, and her dad turns it into a Quibbler Headline— THE OWL WHO LIVED! She meets Ginny in Holyhead after a workout, and they walk the strand-line together, exhausted but alive, and out back of the Burrow she works on volo until a golden version of herself stands in front of her. Older, looking like her mother does in all the pictures, with a ring on her finger and flowers in her hair, and it’s for her and for the Trio and for Regulus Arcturus Black— see, I want to live. 

Here I am, alive. 

________________

(Later, they go with a weeping Kreacher to the ancestral graveyard of the Blacks, cursed six ways to Sunday, trailed by Andromeda and Narcissa and Snape. The peat will be damp, and Hermione puts the original volo notes on his chest in the grave, and Narcissa asks him if he wants the Lordship ring shining on his finger. Harry shakes his head— there’s only one crest he’d want on his hand, since the Potter one too is buried— and Kreacher fills into the grave with magic, stopping only occasionally to wipe at his face. Here lies Regulus Arcturus Black, Harry inscribes on the headstone, Snape’s hand heavy on his shoulder. Servant to no one, co-inventor of volo vivere, who wanted to live.)

(In the years to come: the lawn fight discussion, which will happen in pieces. Neither Harry or Snape want to go at it all at once, it seems, so they’ll loiter in and out of it, explaining actions, dismantling phrases. Harry will be twenty-one, and they will be standing in the Godric’s Hollow graveyard, and he’ll finally ask do you still want her instead of me and Snape will go never, with complete conviction. Years and years later, he will wear three rings: the Prewett, humming with power to the Trio; the ring from Ginny, muggle and ordinary and yet magical because it’s hers; and the stolen Prince Heir ring, which Snape offered to him the winter he was twenty-three. There’s no power to it, and you don’t have to wear it, he’d said; they’d been standing at Lake District watching the snow slough down. But it’s yours if you want it.)

(Harry never takes it off. He feels guilty about it sometimes— about the names they don’t bequeath to the children, about the seat he doesn’t sit in on the Wizengmont, about never being a Slytherin like that. But it is Mrs. Weasley who tells him, when he is twenty-five and the wound of Sirius’s death is still seething, that the dead can’t have everything they want. Dearie, it’s not in doubt that you love them, she will say, her hand over Harry’s on the table as the night devolves into a downpour. But you don’t have to be beholden to what you think they might have wanted, when all they’d really care about is that you’re okay.)

(The Ministry will never report any leads on the fire that razed the ancestral Nott Manor; Theo will assume it got lost in the chaos of the Tonks Tenure. But years and years later, when he’s over at Anthony’s, they’ll both get a bit too tipsy and then Anthony will undo the charms on his casework files and hand him a slim file folder. Nott Manor Fire, the tab will read, and Theo will open it up, two decades rolling back like it’s been no time, seeing the spill of fire and Ginny’s grin. G. Weasley job, Anthony has scrawled on a muggle post-it, tacked to evidence logs and diagrams of the fire and arson reports. Granger elsewhere at approximate time of fire, so Nott must have been involved with wards. Scrawled next to that is the usual list of suspects, with all the right names circled. Theo will look up from the folder to Anthony, who just gives him a smile and raises his glass. Why didn’t you pursue it? Theo will ask, and Anthony will laugh. Wasn’t going to implicate you for something I would have helped with, he’ll say, and in the morning Daphne will turn up with hangover potions, a scowl on her face but laughter in her eyes.)

(In the future, Millie will find a vintage ring in some house her family’s owned for generations with a T on it, press it into his hand one summer evening when they’re twenty. T for Theo, she says, and for Trio. Hermione turns it into a portkey with a touch, and he throws the Nott ring into the Thames and doesn’t regret it, not once. But Neville, with his permission, takes cuttings from the rose bush over his mother’s shrine, and what a thing, to come to dinner at the Burrow and or at the Lovegoods and find them blooming there, huge and pink and alive, as if it was not all for nothing.)

(It will be years before Luna will hear about the Other Side. She’ll be twenty-nine, and Hermione will be in the throes of having Mastery students for the first time, and it will all come out at a pub in Norbury, as summer lightning marbles the sky. Sometimes I think that was why I was able to finish volo, Hermione will say, staring out at the florescent-lit streets. I think she gave me the missing piece. Luna will take her hand, run her finger over the buzz of the Black Heir ring and the engagement ring. Of course she did, Luna will say. She wanted Harry to live, wanted you all to live.)

(Ron won’t tell her about his until she’s pregnant with the twins and scared out of her mind. He’ll sit out back of her dad’s house with her and watch Rolf and her dad walk along the property line together, tall shapes in the distance. I keep having dreams where I don’t make it, she tells him. And they have to grow up without me. He takes her hand, then, heavy with the weight of the ring that was once Hermione’s grandmother’s and the one from Susan, and tells her about the Other Side and James. We’d tell them about you, he says, his shoulder against hers. We wouldn’t let them be alone, you know that. And how she does.)

(And later, after dinners with Neville or Ernie or Hagrid at Hogwarts, she’ll stop by the tomb, thinking of Hallows and Horcruxes and how in the end all the Trio had needed was love. I’m sorry you didn’t really have any friends, either, she’ll whisper, and then the thestrals will walk with her to the ward boundary.)

(And years and years later, in back yards and over lunches and in letters, they’ll tell the children the stories, about the people who died so they could live. About a stepping in front of an avada without hesitation, about a locket and a lake, about a final fight at the Ministry, about a fen in the woods and a body they never found. They would have loved you, they’ll say, and the sun will be high and the children will not be able to wrap their minds around war. They would have loved you they would have loved you they would have loved you.)

Chapter Text

The letter comes in early June, just as Sue and Anthony and Percy have confirmed who in the Wizengmont is or was a Death Eater, and have invoked some loop-hole from the 1300s to take those seats off the table. She’s up early in Birmingham, the boys still passed out on the floor (one of these days they’ll have to figure out how to sleep in separate rooms again, she realizes dimly, but that feels like an insurmountable obstacle right now), and the sunlight is falling through the window. Hedwig is on the sill, looking dismissively at a very normal brown Hogwarts owl, who presents three letters to her— Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley, Hermione Granger— all embossed with the Hogwarts seal. 

She opens the one on top, which is technically Harry’s, with a letter-opener conjured from thin air, and skims the letter, before sitting back on the bed heavily.

As Headmistress, I am pleased to invite you an opportunity for an Eighth Year Program at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the letter reads. Due to the war, we understand that many students were unable to receive the high quality education this institution has become renowned for. 

(When have we ever? Hermione thinks, and then realizes she probably sounds a lot like Flitwick. But in their defense— Binns? Trelawny? Snape, for all he had always been on their team? Lockhart, Umbridge, actual Voldemort, but not even teaching them cool useful things?)

On the window sill, Hedwig tucks her head under her wing; on the floor, Ron mumbles in his sleep about Susan. The intention of this program is to provide a combination of focused tutoring efforts to remedy any shortfalls of previous curriculum gaps, support students in obtaining their NEWTs, and give them guidance in career placement.

Hermione takes a deep breath, and then another, running a hand over the new tattoo on her arm, which she’s already started amending magic to. In the early morning sunlight, Ron’s hair is copper, and Harry could be any skinny eighteen-year-old, with the mess of hair covering the scar. She tries to imagine it, for a moment: the Ravenclaw tower with bronze and blue banners, the chilly Quidditch matches she only went to to support her friends; the library; the wards of the bolthole. When was the last time she actually turned in homework? Some essay for Snape, probably, sixth year— Flitwick had understood she had bigger things on her mind, and halfway through the year she’d finally realized that no matter how good she was, Slughorn would never care because her last name meant nothing. All she’s done since then is volo.

She opens Ron’s letter and scans it; it’s a form letter, same words, different recipient, but on the back is a lengthy note in Sprout’s hand, basically begging Ron not to come back. You have everything you need, honey, she says. There’s nothing for you here. Hermione couldn’t agree more, honestly. 

Hers has an extra sheen of power to it, like spring water and musty parchment, and on the back she sees writing in Flitwick’s bubbly hand. Miss Granger, we would of course be delighted to have you back, but every warding specialist I know has been eager to have you as a Masters student since you took your OWLs, and once you publish volo vivre, you will truly have your pick of anyone in any field. Please let me know if you would like to discuss anything with me.

She shuts her eyes for a minute, just breathes. Her volo notes are currently stowed in several transfigured binders in the foldspace connected to her watch, and the idea of writing it up feels like scaling a mountain, as does that of a Mastery. She swallows, leaves the letters on the bed for the boys along with a quick note, says good morning and goodbye to her parents, and apparates to their war room at the Ministry.

It’s actually mostly empty for once, just the stale smell of coffee and Sue passed out on the cot in the back. She paces the room, picking up and reviewing what her friends have been working on while she’s been with Ron and Harry and her parents— Wizengmont nonsense, mainly. They’ve finally figured out a work-around to the traditional composition it as a body of inherited seats, disgustingly House of Lords-like. Add to that their traditional positions a body both legislative and judicial, it’s really a wonder the Wizarding World functioned even half as well as it did. Hermione personally thinks that if she were Tom Riddle in the 1940s and perhaps wanted to rule the world, all she would have needed were some solid allies and some well-placed imperios. 

(Of course, he hadn’t want to rule when he could burn, but that’s besides the point.)

The saving grace of the inanity of the Wizengmont is the inanity of the heritage of seats, which Anthony had dug out of some archive and Sue and Sue’s mum and Percy and Ernie and Daphne had torn apart six ways to Sunday. It was all about the rings, indicating the right to the seat, and who it should pass to next. The Lord could sit in the seat; the Heir would take it up when they passed. It’s about continuity, Daphne had explained. Whoever’s Lord has to pass the Heir ring down.

Hermione runs her hand over ledgers, where Ernie and Anthony have been hard at work tracking down the history of every single seat, in order to exploit their loophole. Traditionally, the empty seats were appointed by the Minister. But what if they’re elected by the populace?

A hundred and forty-nine seats at the table, now that the Death Eaters are out. (This did technically include the Nott seat, but Theo didn’t give two shits about that.) Eighty or so of them sit empty, and some of them make sense—the Peverell ring is allegedly The Ring, which Harry threw into the depths of the forest; Dumbledore was too paranoid to ever offer anyone the Dumbledore Heir ring; and after disinheriting Sue’s mum, Lord Creighton gave the Heir ring to some Death Eater who died the same year he did, in a Ministry raid. 

And then there’s the Prewetts, where in 1910 the matriarch died without choosing an heir among her seven children; and then there’s the Weasleys, where according to Percy, his great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather had died with weeks of each other, leaving the rings devoid of power. That’s apparently what happened to the Potter ring, James buried before he got to pass on the Heir ring to Harry, though something about that sits wrong with Hermione. James had died so that Harry could live. Surely that kind of act was indicative of who the Heir ring should belong to?

She flips back to the front of the ledger, trails her finger down the seats until she comes to the question. Black, Ernie had written in his steady hand, and then across from it, Anthony had scrawled in Presumed to have died with Regulus, H.Granger. confirmed ring on hand. No one to pass the Heir ring to at time of death.

Hermione rubs her thumb across the ring in question. If Anthony is right, the seat died with Regulus. Sirius giving the Heir ring to Harry, to give to her, and then Sirius dying, means nothing in terms of Wizengmont, in the way the Prewett ring on Harry’s hand and her grandmother’s ring on Ron’s hand do. That’s what the theory says, at least. Theory is good. Theory is right. 

(But theory said there was no counter to avada, but then they went and did it. Theory said death has no master and here the three of them are, and magic is always changing, evolving, a stream with a mind of its own, and maybe—)

(Maybe Regulus, who invented volo, and betrayed the Dark Lord, and decided Kreacher should live, had meant for Sirius to be the Heir. Magic understood emotion, didn’t it; that was the whole core of avada and volo both. Maybe it didn’t matter, about the ring in the coffin and Sirius only finding the Heir ring in the vault after the acquittal. Maybe what mattered was how Regulus had died loving Sirius, and Sirius handing the Black Heir ring to Harry, and the way he’d thrown his head back laughing when he’d seen it on her finger.)

There’s work to be done— on legislation, on how to keep the confirmed Death Eaters from their seats, on who they want to put forward as Minister (Anthony had suggested Sue with complete seriousness, before Daphne had rolled her eyes— Tones, we’ve got to build to that, give me two decades)— but none of it sits right. She can feel from the bonds in the ring that Harry and Ron are still asleep in Birmingham, and she wants them but she also doesn’t— how would she even bring this up to them, the idea of a stolen seat on a council? And what of the letters— they won’t want to go back, she knows in her bones, but what if that’s not the smart call?

She’s jolted out of her reverie by movement out of the corner of her eye as Sue sits up on the cot, running a hand through her hair. She looks exhausted, dark circles under her eyes, but she pulls her hair back into a neat ponytail and raises herself to her feet, taking in Hermione with the sharp precision Hermione’s loved about her since they were eleven. Something keens in her chest at the sight of her, missing the year they didn’t get like an open wound. Turns out that after surveying the mess of papers and the stale coffee, Sue doesn’t want to do work either. They take the elevator up to the street. 

London in the dawn light is all lines and noise, bankers in neat suits and cabbies hollering. They start walking and then just don’t stop, heading towards the river and then along it, the hoary smell of the tidal water and the mud glistening in the dawn. On the Millennium bridge they pause for a long moment, just staring out at the city that’s not theirs yet, but could be. 

“You should run for the Wizengmont,” says Hermione. 

Sue slumps over the rail, looking down into the turbid water beneath. “That’s what Daph said. The Creighton seat, obviously. I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t be good at it.”
The wind, the river, the pedestrians babbling around them. Hermione bites her lip. “Did you get a letter from Hogwarts?”

“Eighth year?” asks Sue. “Yeah, owl showed up middle of the night. Support in obtaining NEWTs, like we couldn’t pass them all right now.” 

“You’ve been doing NEWT-level transfig since before OWLs,” says Hermione. 

“That’s what Flitwick said,” says Sue. “There’s this Professor in Ontario doing mixed-matter transfiguration work that he thinks I’d really get along with. Apparently McGonagall’s willing to write me rec letters and everything.”

Hermione sighs, thinking about the boys and the letter and the ring. “Flitwick said I’d have my pick. Especially if I waited until after we publish the volo paper.” 

Sue laughs, pure and clean, in affirmation. “I take it you’re not going back, then?”

Hermione thinks about walking up to the Ravenclaw tower for the first time at eleven, seeing the library, picking the four poster next to Sue. About the bolthole burning with magic, and the tent in the rain, and wonders how many of the Masteries Flitwick would recommend are in London. A three bedroom flat in the maze of the city with the Potter fortune, Crookshanks flicking his tail on a balcony. Maybe Ron could teach her how to make waffles. “What’s there for us, really?” she asks quietly. 

“A haunted house,” says Sue. “And fucking curfews. Flitwick will be co-author on anything we ask him to anyway, and Anthony’s got Pince wrapped around his finger if there’s something in the library we really can’t live without.”

Beneath them pass a pleasure sailing boat and a fishing vessel. The wind tastes of salt. Hermione prods at the odd space behind her sternum, where the many forking paths of the future sit like stray bottles the night after a rager. The very thought of it is still so new as to be overwhelming, let alone another year at Hogwarts, or any Mastery with anyone, or a Wizengmont seat—

“Do you think,” she asks her friend, watching a stray curl blow in the wind. “I’d be good on the Wizengmont?”

She can feel Sue’s eyes on her. “Thinking of running?” She works her jaw. “I think you’d be good because you care and you read. Campaigning doesn’t fit your style, but Daph could handle it, I guess. What seat?”

“Black,” says Hermione. Silence, except for the wind. She can almost hear Sue’s mind working, and it’s so familiar it hurts. If all this hadn’t happened, would they be at Hogwarts now, studying for NEWTs while finishing up the Masteries they’d talked Flitwick into letting them study towards simultaneously, parchment and tea and the vista of the lake from the study room, no scars on either of their arms?

“Anthony said there were only about six months between Orion’s death and Regulus’s,” says Sue quietly. “And Sirius hadn’t talked to him since he joined the Dark Lord. So it’s not— the Heir ring wouldn’t mean anything.”

Hermione sees the notes on volo sitting on his chest in the grave, the way his quill had torn through the page in several places. She had understood, in the marrow, the thing driving him forward, because it had illuminated the core of her work on the same problem: how can I make sure they live? “He died loved him,” says Hermione. “Shouldn’t that count for something?”

The kids they could have been, in that other timeline, would have dismissed it, Hermione knows. She and Sue are logical to the core, thriving on information. But they’re women in this one, eighteen and skinny and fresh off a war. “It should, shouldn’t it,” says Sue softly, reaching over to trace the Black crest on her hand, the motto catching the light. “It really should.”

They keep walking, over the river, through the city. The conversation flows easily, like the tide: legislation, elections, thoughts on volo, mastery work. The future. 

Maybe the seat’s hers. Maybe it’s not. Maybe, even if it is, she doesn’t want it, like she doesn’t want to go back to Hogwarts and pretend like it would still fit. But they have a lifetime to figure all that out now, do they not, and in the narrow corridors of skyscrapers and possibility, Hermione just takes Sue’s hand. 

_____________

It doesn’t matter where she sleeps— on an extra cot in St. Mungo’s, waiting for Millie to wake up; on the floor of Ernie’s room in Reading; kipping on the couch in the Burrow. She still dreams of the final fight, the blood tacky on her hands, magic hot in the air, mint and mildew, and how it never was enough. 

(She’d never wanted to fight, never intended to. Sure, maybe she could have managed an avada if she’d needed to, but there were people for that. They didn’t need another fighter— they needed a healer. She’d been playing that role already, the whole year, as Head Girl— touching up bruises on her third-years, knitting together wounds on Neville’s face, testing Daphne’s Nerve Restorative brews, just to be sure, though Daphne never faltered.)

(She’d never wanted to fight, but it had been like a fight, still, in the infirmary with Madame Pomfrey as the castle shuddered and the fighters brought the injured in— brought the dead in. She didn’t know almost any of them, thank Merlin— pictures from briefs Anthony had put together about the Order, friends of her dad before the war had divided everything so sharply. It was the living that had hurt, to try to heal, the fear like a bird in her throat— Lavender Brown, twitching from blood loss, saved only by Madame Pomfrey listening to her and brewing enough blood replenisher for a battle. Gemma Farley, struggling to breathe through a nasty hex, saved only because Snape hadn’t actually been shit at teaching DADA and had taught them the counter-curse. Fred Weasley, with extensive blunt force trauma, saved only because Pius Thicknesse had shoved him out of the way.)

(She saved them, maybe. With the kind of magic that came as easily to her hands as breathing. No students, faculty, or staff died in the battle, and that was the war they were fighting the whole damn year, but in the dreams she sees them all, bleeding out under her frozen hands. Justin, Ernie, Theo, Millie, Neville. Susan, Harry, Hermione, Ron.) 

No students, faculty, or staff died in the battle, and she thinks technically she’s part of the reason why, but it doesn’t feel like the victory that it should, sitting in St. Mungo’s next to Millie’s sleeping form while she recovers, standing on gravesides, in receiving lines at funerals, reading about her dad’s arrest in the paper. Her hands are covered in small reopened cuts, from where she cast with her entire being, and she swears she can still smell the smoke as the castle burned, hear the screaming. 

Millie’s released from St. Mungo’s in mid-May— honestly, I’m shocked you survived, Smethwyck had said, and Hannah doesn’t think she’ll ever forget the sight of Millie appearing from thin air in the hospital wing, blood pouring from her eyes, a ring peeling off from her finger only to be subsumed by the stone. I woke it up, Millie had explained three days after the fact, once she’d finally woken up. Her parents, who’d Hannah never met but had turned up from France looking flustered, had looked confused, but Hannah had understood. 

I’m glad you figured it out, she’d said. But also you can never do that again. 

Her parents, ever the French aristocrats, invite her to come home with them, and Hannah agrees without really thinking about it. Time feels slipped, melted— the battle, the blur of days after the battle working in St. Mungo’s, waiting for Millie, talking to the Trio, funerals, the headlines declaring that her dad had been arrested, papers from the Ministry declaring they’re seizing the house— and it’s hard to tell what’s up and what’s down anymore. Thanks for coming home with me, says Millie, when they’re falling asleep in the giant king bed in the manor Millie’s mother apparently prefers in May and June. Hannah can only think about the way the castle had started shunting people to the infirmary, and how Sprout had dropped in on her and Pomfrey at St. Mungo’s in the aftermath to let them know all the students were safe, back form the exit Millie had insisted they make. Thanks for saving us, says Hannah. 

She doesn’t dream of the Hogwarts infirmary, that night. She dreams of the Come-and-Go room, configured as Headquarters, sitting on the bottom bunk with Millie’s head in her lap, as they play the Future game. The lost city is magical, says Millie. I map it all. And then I come back to Britain when you lot start having kids and take them to museums on the weekends and teach them how to look for secret doors.

The cottage is thatched, says Hannah, running a hand through Millie’s curls. In a town with a waterwheel and a little pond with swans. I know all my neighbors and sometimes I come down in the morning to one of you sleeping on the couch. 

We live, says Millie, and in the dream she’s wearing the Hogwarts ring and when Hannah looks down at her own hand there’s no scar across the palm. We live. 

When she wakes up, it’s to Millie curled up against her, and the sunlight falling through the curtains, and for the first time in as long as she can remember, it doesn’t feel like a fever dream. It feels like maybe they could actually get something, if they but stretched out their hands. Breakfast is crepes, and fresh fruit, and in the garden Millie shows her the secret door underneath the ivy, which leads into a tiny shed some ancient Bulstrode used for brewing. “This was my first,” she says, standing in the damp, mildew rising up around them like smoke. “I wandered off from a baby shower and saw an outline under the ivy.” 

Millie’s been trying to get them out here for years, hasn’t she, Hannah realizes, turning around in the gloom. But there’s always been politics, and someone trying to kill Harry, and the haunting specter of the war. But the Dark Lord is dead, and against all odds they got their crew out of the final battle intact, and the entire future is theirs to ply. “I want to see it all,” Hannah declares, and Millie’s eyes light up in the gloom.

Days at the Bulstrodes’s sprawl into weeks. There’s a comfort to it; she understands finally why Millie never talked about her parents much— they’re perfectly ordinary and slightly dull people, who mostly concern themselves with managing their business empire. Susan appears from the firmaments eventually, and then Theo, and then Daphne, and there’s a warmth to it, sitting out back by the shimmering water of the pool with the girls and Theo, a few bottles of wine and the war like a distant dream. 

She tries not to think about her dad too much, as they stand in receiving lines at funerals, as the Prophet reports the lists of the dead at Hogwarts, as she and Susan walk circles in the heat. She’s glad beyond measure that he’s alive, and a lifetime in prison is probably exactly what he deserves for working the Dark Lord’s regime, but there’s still a kind of grief there. She thinks sometimes of how he’d found her after the incident with her mother and the scar on her palm, curled up in the closet in her bedroom sobbing, and once he’d figured out who’d hurt her he’d refused to let her mother in through the wards again. Like she was more important than the love of his life.

Why wasn’t I more important than a regime, and an ideology, she thinks, watching the light hit the water of the swimming pool as Theo treads water and a giggling Susan splashes water at Millie, but that’s the ancestral question, isn't it? And answers don’t come easy, not even in the French twilight.

Four weeks after the battle, as May begins to bleed into June, she finds herself at the Burrow one hot afternoon. Millie has been roped into shopping for baby clothes with Mrs. Weasley and Fleur and Luna; Ginny is at workouts for the Harpies (dodged the baby clothes hex, thank Merlin); Neville is at St. Mungo’s; Ron and Susan are off snogging in some thicket; Hermione and Anthony and the rest of them are off at the Ministry, trying to rebuild the world. So it’s just her and Harry in the heat to go down to the creek at the bottom of the garden, Harry picking up stray stones to skip. He’s got a new shirt and shoes, and his hair looks glossier and his cheeks less hollow, but there’s still something unstable to him, half-wild in summer light.

Maybe she’s supposed to ask about the quest, she thinks, watching him as the stones spark against the water. About the horcruxes and the mechanics and how the hunger felt. Maybe she’s supposed to ask about Snape— after all, in the space of a month he’s gone from public enemy number one to the person buying Harry clothes. But she’s heard those stories already, in bits and pieces, from Harry himself and from Ron and Hermione, and she’s no Ravenclaw. Unless it’s important for them to tell her, what does it matter, about a quest and a resolution and when the patronus changed, when the fact of it is sign enough?

“If you’re not going back to Hogwarts,” Hannah says slowly, not taking her eyes off him. “What are you going to do?”

Harry flings one last rock and then turns to her, panting slightly. The Trio had made their feelings known a few days ago, but Hannah had never really thought they would go back— what was Hogwarts, to them, but a death trap and a battle zone— and Pomfrey had scrawled on the back of hers this is bullshit, I’ll get you into any healing program you want, NEWTs or no NEWTs. So that had been a choice made for her, which she can’t say she regrets anyway. 

Harry’s just staring at her; eventually, she fills the silence for him. “I’m going to go to a Healing program,” she says. “Justin’s applying for muggle unis with a faked transcript, and Susan’s pretty much already got a job at the DLME.”

Harry swallows, and then scrambles up the bank to sit beside her. Up close, it’s clear that he’s still underweight, and the scar is only just now being coaxed to heal. He puts his forearms over his knees and leans into them, looking out over the creek. “Kingsley wants all three of us for Aurors,” he says softly. “‘Mione said no, off the bat. But me and Ron—“ He shifts his jaw. “What else would we do, really?”

Everything. Hannah scoots closer to him, until her shoulder is pressed against his; he slumps into the contact like she knew he would. She thinks about the way Harry flew at Quidditch matches at school— he’s not Ginny, of course, but someone would have him, surely. She thinks about how he’d stood up in front of the DA with a cool confidence, a better teacher than everyone save Lupin, perhaps; she thinks about what she knows of his past, growing up with nothing in the muggle suburbs, and the languishing branch of the DLME that deals with child abuse. The scar across the palm of her hand itches, even though her mum’s dead and it’s over.

“Anything,” she says, softly. “Anything at all.”

Silence, expect for the wind and the creek. Harry looks down at his hands, brown and flecked with scars. “It’s all been a fight, in one way or another,” he says softly. “I don’t know what I’d do without it, I think.”

That upsets her, on a level too deep to put a name to, and she takes his hand fiercely in both of hers. “We’d figure it out, Harry,” she says, urgent, in a way that makes him meet her eyes with his green ones. “We’d throw dinner parties and open shops and play pick-up matches and run for seats in the Wizengmont and get Masteries and get drunk in shitty muggle pubs and snog people and just— just live.”

Harry blows out a breath. The creek churns past them, and high up in the branches caws a lone crow. “That’s what I want,” he says. “That’s— that’s what was in volo, when I cast it,” and Hannah thinks of the hall filled with golden figures, all the dead of the war back for a final reckoning. “It just feels so far off now, I suppose.”

“Tell me about it,” says Hannah, reaching for the game. “Tell me about your future.”

And so they sit on the bank as the sky melts down into pinks and he tells her, about the flat in London, and the clock on the wall, and everyone with the floo password, Ron cooking and Hermione studying and snogging Ginny after matches, and she understands. 

“It’s not about the job, then,” she says. “It’s about everything else.” He looks at her. “You’ll do the job,” she says slowly, trying to make him understand. “Be an Auror, or whatever. But just to have something to do. The real core of it is what you’re coming home to. And that’s a war you already won.”

Something odd ripples across his face, like a stone into water, and she taps at the ring on his finger, the Prewett crest shining, and thinks about how easily her magic had spilled out for her friends in the battle, and how Susan, Justin, and Ernie had all offered to come with her to visit her dad in prison. “You’re not alone,” she says. “None of us are.”

Harry doesn’t say much, on the long walk back to the Burrow. But next week, when he and Ron and Hermione go into London to look at flats, he invites her to come, and pacing around old industrial lofts and post-war towers, trying to decide how magic might interact with mold and nosy downstairs neighbors, everything feels fluted and illuminated, like the future is a portico filled with light.

_____________

There is only one person she can really stomach going back with, and she knows he’ll say yes because it’s Ron, he’s on her team until the sun burns out, but when she asks it will be real, and so she can’t quite bring herself to. May has burned off into June, and the funerals are winding down, and Mrs. Weasley said she didn’t have to leave any time soon— actually, what she had said, sitting her down in the kitchen and clasping both her hands was no matter what happens with you and Ron, you’re as good as another daughter, dearie, and Susan won’t lie that it made her break down weeping— and she knows it has to be done, but she just doesn’t want to. 

It will be real, then, and there’s something hideous about that. 

Most days, things feel tenable. She’s clerking in the newly reformed DLME, NEWTs or no NEWTs, handling case files and making sure the Geneva Convention is being followed. Sometimes she runs errands for Anthony or Hermione or Daphne, apparating to some ancient library or meeting with a witness in a decaying canal town. It’s good, clean work, important to the rebuilding, and then she’ll come back to the Burrow and watch Ginny fly, or talk to Harry, or go on a walk with Ron where they talk and hold hands and snog a little. 

(They haven’t gone further than that, though she can feel the chemistry crackling in the air like ozone. Maybe, in a world where she wasn’t an orphan twice over and he wasn’t still thin and jumpy from a year on the run, they would have skivved off NEWT studying and found some broom closet. But it’s too much, somehow, at the moment, to think about crossing into another plane, and so he just holds her hand as they walk down the lane, steady and hers.)

Most days, things feel tenable, and then on occasion the sheer magnitude of what winning the war cost them will hit her again, and she’ll be struggling for breath on the cot in Ginny’s room or out by the hedgerows, or locked in a loo at Millie’s parents’s estate in France. In the mirror, she looks like she always has— round face, fluffy yellow hair— but the face in the mirror is her mother’s, is her father’s, is her aunt’s, and there wasn’t even a body to bury and maybe that shouldn’t hurt so much but it does, but it does—

Ron’s not dead, Harry’s not dead, Hermione’s not dead; their friends are alive and they’re making the Ministry better and Snape wasn’t a traitor after all and Millie woke the castle up and saved their lives and it’s fine, it’s fine—

(It’s not.)

She thought it would feel different, she supposes, to win. To have all the sacrifices mean something. To have a body count and scars and nightmares. Wasn’t avada supposed to change you? But it had come as easily as breathing, as she’d known deep down it would— she was no witch of great power or talent, but no one got to hurt Theo, or Lavender, or the students. None of the nightmares are about Tiberius Nott or Greyback or Amycus Carrow caught in a snare of green, and she doubts there ever will be. 

She thought it would feel different, but the dead are still dead. Three gravestones in the magical section in Woking, dates and names and Ron’s flowers, which are always better than hers. 

(Maybe it’s not about it being real, when she goes back with Ron to clean out the flat, deciding what to do with her aunt’s things. Maybe it’s about the fact that he lost nothing, which isn’t strictly true but is what it feels like. Maybe it’s about how he has a lovely leaning house full of siblings, and a mother and a father, not orphaned even once and yeah he was starving off the grid, but some fucked up part of her needs him to hurt like she’s hurt before it can be any kind of real. Which is itself a lie, because she thinks she’s loved Ron with her entire being since she was about thirteen, and will die loving him, but also it’s just not fair. Millie with her rich parents and Daphne just not caring and Theo so relieved and Sue’s talking to her mum again, isn’t that fantastic; Luna’s dad is working with Neville in the garden and Nev’s never had one proper conversation with his, Hermione’s got everything and Harry’s got nothing except somehow there’s Snape with his one-antlered yearling of a patronus and she just wants—)

(She just wants her aunt.)

Ron comes to find her in the graveyard in Woking, sitting in front of the headstone with a bottle of something cheap she picked up from a local shop. The sunset is murky, like being held underwater. She knows it’s him from the way he walks, stands, breathes, can taste his magic in the back of her throat. She wants to ask him how he found her— sometimes he seems to just have a sixth sense about where she is at any moment. 

“Did you find a flat?” she asks instead. The three of them and Hannah and Justin and Luna had been up in London all day, touring listings and introducing the purebloods to the Tube. Ron sits down heavily beside her; he’s wearing a new shirt Hermione’s parents bought him and a pair of Bill’s old jeans, his wand holstered against his forearm. 

“There’s a few we like,” he says. “Hermione wants a view of the river and Harry likes the industrial lofts with all the light. The one I liked Luna went round and chatted to the neighbors and said they were a bit off.”

Susan tries to imagine what that future would look like. The Trio sharing an industrial loft in some far-off part of London, Luna doing a wall mural and Neville’s plants on the sill. Where do I fit in, she wonders. Welcome or not, it feels odd to imagine living at the Burrow for an extended period of time. But she can’t imagine living the Woking flat without her aunt, and she already know she’s not going back to Hogwarts for some bogus eighth-year program, especially if Ron’s not there. 

“You should come with us on Saturday,” says Ron, his arms pulled over his knees. “You’re going to be there a lot, you should have an opinion.”

She just nods. He shifts closer, so his shoulder is a point against hers, and something about the contact makes her let out a shuddering breath, and then she’s got her head buried in her hands and his arm is around her, hot tears dripping into the clay. “It’s alright, Suze,” he’s saying, and that just makes it worse. 

“It’s not, though,” she says, jolting from his embrace and stumbling to her feet, the graveyard spinning under the grey sky. He’s just looking up at her on the ground, like he has always looked at her, she thinks, but there are more scars across his face and an exhaustion wrought deep into the corners of his eyes and how the hell was it easier to keep it together during an actual war than it is in the aftermath?

Crows scattering into the murky sky. There’s no body in the grave beneath her and she knows it shouldn’t matter but it does, but it does. Ron is looking at her like he loves her, which he has since he met her, and now it’s a different kind of love without loosing the first somehow and she wants what he has, house with loving family and no funerals, she always has, so acutely that it hurts—

“You didn’t have to bury anyone,” she says, which isn’t true but her voice is like a knife with it. “You’ve got everything and I’ve got nothing.”

Ron is on his feet at that, eyes blazing, and some part of her that she doesn’t think she had before the war rejoices at getting a rise out of him. “What are we, chopped liver?” he says, and his hands are shaking. “I know we’re not your aunt, but Suze—“ Something cracks in his face, and the fact that she’s spent the past month avoiding burns up to the front of her mind: he died out there.

(Rockwood hit him with a sectumsempra meant for Harry in the front hall of Grimmauld. Harry had gotten him out, to the woods, and he’d bled out in the snow. They brought me back, Ron had said, when he’d told her about it, one night a few weeks ago sitting out back of the Burrow as the thunderstorm loomed in the distance; he’d been fiddling with the ring from Hermione. I just— I was over there, and I just followed the threads back to them.)

(She’s always known the Trio’s love for each other is different than what she has with Ron, what she wants to have with Ron, but she wasn’t prepared for it to be that much, like Death was just another place to walk into, be pulled back. Come back, we cannot live without you. She loves him, she will always love him, she thinks. But like that, to warp the very fabric of her soul so that Ron or Ernie or Hannah or Justin could get back to her from anywhere?)

Ron takes a step closer to her as something cracks on her face. “Suze, you have us. Forever.”

She’s sobbing, and beneath her the clay and above them the boiling clouds and everywhere the dead, and no matter how many Death Eaters she’d killed it wouldn’t have brought her Aunt back but she wants her, and she wants Ron and she wants Ron to hurt and Ron’s already hurt far too much for her to stomach and she wants to kiss the scars away but they’ll be there for a lifetime and she really had held it all together so well last year and now—

“You died,” she sobs out, and then he’s there, his hand on her face. 

“I came back,” he says. 

“It’s not enough,” she says, and she sees something in his face crack, but not in offense. Just in a way that means he understands. He pulls her in, arms around her shoulders, and then he’s crying too, salt on her collarbone.

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

They don’t go back to the Burrow like they’re supposed to; they don’t go back to her Aunt’s flat or Millie’s country house or the Ministry. They just walk the canal in the languid twilight, not talking, not really. Ron is a familiar presence at her side, but the year they spent apart hangs heavy over everything. Is she ready to hear about it, in it’s entirety— the hunger and the fights, the nightmares and the grief; how it felt to watch Hermione bleed out on the beach, how it felt to have Harry walk away into the woods? 

(Is she ready to tell him about the days after her Aunt died when he wasn’t there and it was like a physical pain, about the hideousness of the castle, about how she knows logically that Snape’s on their side but it’s hard to make it click in her mind because of how he was as Headmaster?)

He takes her hand in the twilight. The grief fractures, metastasizes, like a stone thrown into a pond, and Susan thinks about the summers she spent playing rugby, and sitting by the floo just talking to Ron, and the oddness of clerking at the DLME in the aftermath of the war, and what it might be like to wake up at the Trio’s flat in the morning, Ron cooking breakfast and Harry with bedhead and Hermione already working on something at the kitchen table. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, as they watch a barge lift through the lock in the dwindling light. “I’m sorry and I love you.”

“I love you too, Susan,” says Ron, and it’s not enough, but maybe one day it will be.

_____________

(In the future, Hermione will learn that she does not need the ring they buried Regulus with to claim the seat. By then, Sue has won her first term of many in the Creighton seat and Daphne sits in the Greenglass one with her trademark calm. They build a new government the best they can, between Masteries and families and watching Ginny fly for the Harpies. No one questions the legitimacy of it to her face, but she will hear the whispers sometimes, off in the corners— mudblood, bewitched Potter like she bewitched Black— and she doesn’t need Ron and Harry to start fights on her behalf, but it does warm something in her chest when they do. No enchantments here, she’ll think sometimes, sitting in the Wizengmont in a smart set of Ravenclaw blue robes Fleur picked out for her, seeing the notes on volo and Harry handing over the ring without hesitation and Sirius throwing his head back laughing when he saw it on her finger that first time. Just love.)

(It will be years before she goes back to Hogwarts, and then only to help Harry set up his office once he finally accepts the DADA post. She’ll leave him and Ron and Susan and Ginny to unpack, and go back up to the fifth floor, to the bolt hole. Lean her head against the door frame and feel the weight of the wards, how hers have intertwined with Snape’s and Flitwick’s and Sprout’s and McGonagall’s, but somewhere in the long intervening years they’ve lost that ragged, unhinged edged she used to cast with. There’s something welcoming to them now, and inside it no longer looks like it did the night they left it after the battle. A Gryffindor banner has been added to the ones Fred and George stole for them, and new lists have been tacked up next to theirs from first year. Another couch, new plants; books about translocation and transfig and is that her monograph from 2004, about ward scapes? Like generations of students have been coming here, flocking to the way her wards now say if you need protection, you’ll find it here. And why does that make her want to weep, at what her love has become?)

(Later on, Harry will tell Hannah about the quest— on long night sitting out on the roof of the Trio’s London place; in the kitchen of the place she and Justin and Ernie and Susan share; out in the garden behind the Longbottom manor with the moon a fingernail, the children asleep and not dreaming of war. She will listen to it all, hold it close, and thank him for the effort of it. But we made it out, she’ll tell him, over and over again— buying him rounds at the pub; healing up hex damage from a raid gone bad with the Aurors; making him waffles after he’s spent the night. Somewhere, as the years become decades, she thinks he starts to believe it.)

(Still to come: the sheer enigma of her father, who will do five years for his part in the war, retire to a cottage in Wales, and buy her children thoughtful birthday and Christmas gifts, and refuse to speak to Neville, or Harry. She knows her friends would have handled it differently— Daphne never talks about her mother; Ernie had grieved the void his parents weren’t taking up long before they fought for the enemy; Theo had been nothing but delighted at his father’s demise— but she simply isn’t built like that. She goes up to Wales every other weekend and takes tea with him, and talks about work and the children and when Harry talks about how he knows the Grangers and the Weasleys and Snape all love him but not enough sometimes, not right, she will knows exactly what he means.)

(Later, Susan with go back with Ron to the flat where she grew up, armed with only her wand and lunch from Mrs. Weasley. She’ll be nineteen, then; nineteen and living in Glasgow and still so tremendously afraid. The wards have kept everything meticulous, and she’ll start sobbing when she sees the picture of her and her parents still tacked up on the fridge. She’ll go back with Ron, but it won’t be long before they call in reinforcements, and one by one the crew will trickle in— Sue with a neat transfiguration solution for boxes; Hannah with a calm resolve in the face of under-sink cabinets; Justin with a boombox and songs to dance to; Ernie with precise charms to preserve the pictures; Hermione, unsentimental and ruthless, telling her she doesn’t really need to keep take-away soy sauce packets; Harry, who understands cleaning out a haunted house; Theo, cracking cabinets and safes; Daphne, neatly folding clothes and summoning tissues from thin air for her; Neville, standing at her shoulder and steadying her; Millie, trying all the doors. And with all of them everywhere, bustling in and out, Ginny swearing up a blue streak after dropping a box on her foot and Anthony getting distracted by old DLME reports, it will feel like home again, for just one more moment.)

(In the years to come: the ache. One by one, she’ll read the letters her aunt wrote for her, sob at every one; miss her like a wound that just won’t close. She will be a good clerk, and then case worker, for the DLME; she will have a lovely family, and dedicated friends who even in their forties and fifties will pop over at all times of the night, if she but calls. But she never stops wanting, either. She won’t resent Ron, for having two lovely parents, especially considering they’re also basically her parents after a bit, but sometimes it’s not him who she needs, sitting in the graveyard. Ron, being Ron, figures it out after a while, and will just go to get Neville or Harry, and together they’ll sit out in the dusky graveyard and hurt.)

(And years and years later, the grief burns lower, and they go to garden parties, and Wizengmont mixers, and the inane balls some of the Pureblood still throw. What a thing, to walk into rooms and have your eyes snap up to someone, know in your bones they’re on your team, that they would fight dirty to back your play? Not alone, Hermione will think, dancing with Daphne at the annual gala for the Wizengmont, while across the room Sue plots her first bid at Minister. Not alone, Hannah will think, when her and Neville host Ernie for dinner in their apartment in Hogwarts, laughing about their students’s antics. Not alone, Susan will think, as she and Harry and Luna and Ron scream their lungs out for Ginny starting as Seeker for Britain in the World Cup. Never again.)

Chapter Text

Three transfers from Kings Cross to get to Cornwall, so it’s dark when he gets back, wand up his sleeve and Seamus at his shoulder. Micheal’s parents had picked him up, but Seamus’s were still in Boston, where they’d fled when the Ministry had fallen. “I’ll owl them tomorrow,” Seamus says, blood still matted in his hair and a black eye blooming across his face. Dean looks around the house— Ernie and Hermione’s wards pulsing against the eves; the bucket catching the dregs of the rain; laundry hanging up on the fold-out rack in the living room— and feels like he can breathe for the first time in months. He remembers, as if from a dream, the first years at Hogwarts, when it had felt like an escape. 

His mum’s probably still working down at the local, but between him and Seamus they manage a not too rubbish transfiguration for a cot in his room, dig out some West Ham jumpers and shower to get the blood off. 

The dreams reek of dark magic, and Ginny doesn’t claw her way up from the end of the bridge, and Harry stays stone cold dead in the pre-dawn light, and the castle doesn’t shift to absorb the killing curse that would have ended Colin right in front of them. He wakes once, to his mum pressing a kiss to his face and pulling up the blanket; he wakes again to Seamus’s face. “Had a dream where you were dead, mate,” he whispers, and outside the rain, and Dean just shifts over to the wall and Seamus curls up next to him. 

There are no more dreams, just waking to the smell of rashers, and trying to explain to his mum the battle, sitting at the rickety table in the kitchen while Seamus scrawls a quick note to his parents. “So it’s really over, then?” his mum asks, flipping her gaze between the two of them. The newspaper on the table has headlines about Eurovision and the Good Friday accords, and everything that happened at Hogwarts feels a world away.

“He’s dead,” says Seamus through a mouthful of rasher. “Harry got him.”

“Harry and Hermione and Ron, really,” says Dean, thinking of how the three of them had stood together in the center of the hall, facing down the monster. How everything had gone liquid and gold, golden figures stepping out into the hall to protect them. A counter to avada, someone said, up in the tower while they waited to go home, and Dean supposed that was a very Granger thing to come up with. 

His mum nods as she piles more rashers on his plate. “School’s out now, I suppose?” she asks, a quirk of a smile on her face. Dean looks around the familiar kitchen— his Hogwarts letter tacked up on the fridge, along with the potions essay he’d gotten an E on (Snape had scrawled surprisingly well done on it, and Snape is still an enigma— possibly on Harry’s side the whole time, but still a right prick— but his praise still mattered, somehow) and the picture of their team sixth year that had won the house cup. 

“Suppose so,” says Seamus. “What do you want to do today, mate?”

The pitch is saturated, and the mud is sticky and deep, and he and Seamus never did pay enough attention in charms to figure out how to alter the weather. But they kick the football around, playing one-on-one in the downpour with a manic glee like they’re kids still. Like Hogwarts is still a magical, safe place, like they haven’t spent the past year on reckless guerrilla missions trying to save a world that didn’t really want them, muggleborn and half-blood they are. 

Everything hurts, like the aftermath of punching a wall— the bodies laid out in the hall; the sight of Harry dead; the way Ginny had pulled herself up from the bridge with a grin, like they hadn’t just killed dozens of people. Evil people, sure, but still people. 

(Don’t think like that, Neville had said, sometimes, in TA meetings and mission briefings, and Dean had tried but the truth of it was that he’d never been that kind of Gryffindor. Daring, and chivalrous, and a bit of a trickster, but not with that thing Ginny and Neville and Kellah seemed to have, ruthless and brutal.)

(Yeah, they were monsters, but probably somewhere there was a spouse, a child to mourn them, to wonder where their body was when they never came home, and sure they’d done what they needed to do to win the war but it’s fucked up, how they did it, right? Voldemort killed people, and now they have too.)

The off-license place down the block has what they want. The twilight comes down, yellow and rain-besotted, and they sit up on the hill and watch the town beneath them, watch the long tendrils of the sea all grey in the distance, trading the bottle back and forth.

“Can’t believe we did it,” says Seamus. 

“Me neither,” says Dean. The alcohol is shit but it’s doing the job, leaving a heady buzz in his brain, and he tries, for the first time in months, to imagine some kind of future. 

He doesn’t get very far, but it’s the effort that counts, right?

The days slide by into each other, as he wakes and sleeps and wanders. Seamus apparates back to Dublin to meet his parents; he takes a train up to see Lavender once she’s released from the hospital, and a train over to see Colin at his parents’s estate. Apparates to the Burrow to play a few practice matches with Ginny, who’s apparently got an invite from the Harpies. Do you want me to ask around for you, she asks him seriously; he considers it, back in Cornwall with the salt hanging heavy in the air. He’s not bad at Quidditch, in the same way he wasn’t bad at football. Probably not good enough to earn a permanent seat on some rooster, but maybe if he trained, clawed his way back from the reserve, proved himself— it would be worth it, right, for the chance? To fly around the stadiums with the crowd going wild, just like he’d always dreamed of as a kid? 

(How to explain, that just because he fought a war for it doesn’t mean he wants it? Even in the narrow alleys and the cloistered pubs of Truro, the smell of cigarettes hanging everywhere and the drunks cussing up a storm, there’s this sense of civilization, of wholeness, that he’d always struggled to find at Hogwarts.)

(How could he go back, fly around the arena and catch the quaffle and pretend like it all hadn’t happened?)

He tells Ginny thanks but no thanks, and throws the letter about eighth year away, and looses one football in the marsh and another to the train tracks, and in the dreams his friends are dead on the tight-fitted stones and don’t get up. 

It’s June when his mum informs him he needs a job. “If school’s over, it’s over,” she says. “But you can’t just sit around the house all summer with nothing to do. I swear every other person at the pub is looking for help with something.”

So that’s how he finds himself out on the pitch, watching the children with their shin guards and slang mill around, assistant coach whistle and all. Doug Richards, coach and regular at the local, gives him a once over, nods to himself, and directs him to make sure the kids are actually doing the warm-ups while he takes a quick smoke break. 

Dean takes a deep breath, and then another, as the kids coalesce in the field. Overhead, the sky is furrows, and Voldemort has been dead for a month, and these kids are the same age as the tiny Gryffindors he took blows for all last year, just to give them a shot at a better world. He knows this town, knows coming of age in it wasn’t all fun and games, but it never involved threats of torture and genocidal maniacs. 

We won, he tells himself, as the kids chatter, mud on the cleats and no dreams of war. Maybe it was never about saving the magical world, not really; maybe all along, it had been about this, about the muggle kids who Voldemort would have killed for not having magic, as if that had ever mattered. He flexes his hand, feels his magic come to his palm like clay and fennel, and then lets it fade, unneeded under the curdled sky. Blows the whistle, calls the kids to order. We won.

______________

She wakes up in a hospital bed still primed for a fight, fumbling for her wand and trying to draw on magic she just doesn’t have. It’s not until Madame Pomfrey appears, exhausted and wearing different robes, but unmistakably the Hogwarts Matron, that Lavender realizes she’s not in the middle of an active combat zone.

“Honey, it’s okay,” says Madame Pomfrey, pulling up a chair and sitting down in it. “You’re at St. Mungo’s. The battle’s been over for a couple of days, we won.”

Lavender feels her jaw drop open. “We— we won? Like— like Voldemort’s dead?”

Madame Pomfrey winces at the name but nods. “Harry and Ron and Hermione got him.”

No surprise there. That had been the one comfort she’d clung to this past school year, working out angles for the resistance and trying her best to be a useful Prefect to the terrified firsties— at least the Trio were out there, trying to finish it. Ron was smart and strategic; Harry was the best defense teacher they’d ever had; Hermione was Hermione; how could the Dark Lord stand a chance? 

(The illusion had cracked under the pressure sometimes, when she was holding an icepack to a black-eye, or that time she and Kellah and Parvati had nearly run into the monster who was technically her father on a recon mission, standing terrified in a dank Liverpool alley not daring to breathe. It had cracked when she had started crying before class trying to apply eyeliner, at just the thought of going back out there and facing it all; it had cracked when she’d sat in the Great Hall at Gryffindor under the weight of Snape’s stare and missed Ron. Not even snogging him, but just the way he’d looked at her, like it mattered it was her. Times like that, she’d thought about the family tree Ernie had forged for her and wondered how long it would be before someone thought to check, how long it would be before the newspapers would be reporting that Harry was dead and now they were fighting without a figurehead.)

(Not like that would have stopped them— she and the girls were in it to the end. It would have just hurt more, all the way down to the bone.)

Lavender looks around the ward, trying to get her bearings. “What— why am I here?”

“You were hurt pretty badly in the battle, dear,” says Madame Pomfrey. “Nothing we couldn’t fix, but werewolf injuries are always a tricky one. We thought it best to keep you under for a couple of days and let the potions run their course.”

Lavender has a distant memory of something heavy on her chest, something like tearing or biting, and pain, before shoving it away. She refocuses on Madame Pomfrey, the real question she needs answered burning beneath her sternum. She can’t remember much of the battle— Susan had made Leanne and Emma leave, thank God, because they were not equipped for a firefight; Kellah had gone with Ginny and the boys to blow up a bridge; she has a distant memory of the twins fighting alongside Morag— 

“Are— what happened?” she asks, unable quite to voice it, the fear welling up in her chest like an oil seep. “Did anyone—“

“No students, faculty, or staff were killed,” says Madame Pomfrey, well-rehearsed and even, and Lavender feels her shoulders slump in relief. “The casualties were mostly in the Order, and the House Elf Union.” Lavender tries to not seem too relieved, but she doesn’t really know most of the Order anyway. But—

“Ron and Harry and Hermione are okay, though?”

Madame Pomfrey nods. “Yes. The Dark Lord attempted to spread a rumor that he had killed Harry, but it was fake. They’re fine.”

Lavender sits back against the pillows, which Madame Pomfrey adjusts with magic. The ward is lit by the afternoon sun lazing through the windows, and seems to be mostly empty. Her mind cycles through questions and priorities: Voldemort, dead; her friends, alive; war, over; the Trio, alive; the Order had taken most of the casualties, but that was fine because she didn’t really know anyone in the Order— 

“Amanda Pryor,” Lavender says, which comes out more desperate that she intends. “Is she—“

“Oh, she’s fine, honey,” says Madame Pomfrey, and Lavender has only met the women once, and hadn’t had the guts to admit that she knew she was her bio mum, but maybe the sheer relief she feels says it all. “Dropped off a letter for you, actually, for when you woke up. I can fetch it for you, when you feel up to it.”

Oh, she knows, Lavender thinks, but can’t find a place in her chest for any emotion other than relief. She sinks back into the pillows as Madame Pomfrey waves her wand in what she now knows is a diagnostic charm, and starts taking notes on her vitals, making comments on how well all the cursed wounds are healing. Apparently since Greyback wasn’t transformed, she won’t be a full werewolf, but things might be weird. 

It’s not until Madame Pomfrey has finished applying some salve to the gnarly wounds across her abdomen (crop tops are probably out for a while, she supposes), before the next important question coalesces in her mind. “What about Dolohov?” she asks. “He’s not— he’s not still alive, is he?”

If Madame Pomfrey has questions about why she might care very specifically about one Death Eater, she doesn’t ask them, just grimaces. “He is most certainly dead. Severus’s work too,  if the condition of the body is any indication.”

More relief. And then what Pomfrey said catches up to her. “Wait, Snape killed him?”

And so, for the next twenty minutes, until her mums come rushing into the ward from their lunch, apologizing over and over again for leaving her— mum, I’m fine, seriously; ma, it’s enough that you came— Pomfrey tells her about Severus Snape, and the battles going on behind the scenes this year, and what Harry had declared to Voldemort and the entire Great Hall with his chin held high (sometimes, Lavender is still confused why he wasn’t sorted Gryffindor). Which makes no sense— hadn’t Snape spent the entire year being categorically awful to them— but he did kill her biological father. So maybe that counted for something. 

She goes home with her mums, back to the cottage, and sleeps off the injuries with the cats curled up to her chest in the sunlight, the wind-chimes infecting her dreams. The issues of the Prophet have photos of McGonagall and the Death Eaters and the dead, and when she wakes sometimes Kellah is there, or Parv and Padma, or Leanne and Emma. In the dreams, it’s green and screaming and the heavy weight of a form on her chest, ripping and tearing, but when she wakes up Kellah has the latest issue of Witch Weekly or the victory edition of the Quibbler (including a list of the editors’s picks for Minister of Magic, which was somehow a list made up entirely of mythical creatures, various members of Oasis, or Newt Scamander four separate times), and it stills something panicked and fluttery in her chest. 

We won, she tells herself, as she tacks up the list of the dead from the battle on the wall, just to remind herself that none of her friends are on it. We won, she tells herself, as she sits out back of Colin’s mansion and tries to explain to her friends how she can just feel the phase of the moon now, pulling under her skin. We won, she tells herself, as she throws up at one in the morning after a particularly awful nightmare where it’s Colin dead on the castle lawn. We won won we won, but it’s not quite enough, is it? 

How can anything be enough, after all of this?

The letter about eighth year comes in early June; Trelawny had scrawled a long note on the back of hers, about True Sight and prophecies and how most Divination was just guess work, but she could try to pursue the field at a higher level. Lavender sits on her bed in the cottage, the voices of her mums lazing from downstairs, and tries to imagine going back to Hogwarts. It all feels so long ago, the version of her that giggled with Kellah in the dorm about crushes and worried so much about what her hair looked like before class and thought she’d be some seer, reading palms in a sweltering teashop, the future just another place you could prospect. 

(She still can’t cast a patronus, but she can sure as hell cast AK. The scars on her chest itch and pull, and when she learns Susan Bones killed Greyback, her first impulse is to send her a thank you card. Has this always been here, this version of herself that’s all teeth and claws, or is this what wars do to people?)

(Can it be both at the same time?)

The letter from her biological mother is short, and she reads it in the tall grass behind the cottage, jumper sleeves shoved up and the moon waning. I understand if you want nothing to do with me, Amanda Pryor writes, Amanda Pryor who didn’t have to stay and fight but did, but did. But if you would like, I would be honored to get to know you better. From what little I have seen and heard, you are a remarkable women. There’s an address in Diagon, and the routing for a floo connection, and Lavender puts her head down to her knees and wills herself not to cry.

We won, she thinks, and when she tries this time, alive and altered and yet still fundementally herself, the wood duck steps out into the heather, as elegant as Kellah had said it would be. 

The tears come thick then, and don’t stop, not for a long time.

______________

Greg walks back the long way from the viaduct, still a little unsure how to use the buses. But Mr. Ted had said he would teach him and Draco, just as soon as he was done being Minister, and Greg thinks it might not be the worst thing, to know how to buy the little pieces of paper with the odd muggle money. He’s learned a lot of things this past month, like how to hold a baby (from Draco), and basic cleaning charms (from Lady Tonks), and how to alter personal warding packages, just to be safe when out in muggle Manchester (from Professor Lupin), and a little bit of blood magic (from Lady Malfoy, when he and Draco had both had nightmares and were too keyed up to go back to bed). 

Greg walks in the lazy Manchester heat, blending into the cobblestone and brickwork like just another bloke in secondary school. He’s got his sleeves rolled up, but it’s not really for the heat; it’s to remind himself that they actually did it. Despite promises and letters and what his last name meant, he’d come away from this whole mess without a Mark on his arm and without a murder to his name, and it still feels unreal, like a mirage.

The past year falls in curls around him as he walks, like visions from a nightmare. The long summer at the Goyle Estate, waiting for summons that never came; trying and failing to cast avada on birds at his father’s behest. His exhausted, hurting father, who was Lord of the House by default and a Death Eater by default too, because his father had been in school with the Dark Lord and now here they were, the Goyle loyalty twisted against them. None of his avadas had ever worked; even now Greg’s not sure if he didn’t have that need, or if he’s just such a shite wizard the power didn’t take. Maybe both. 

The long summer; the fall of the Ministry; the mockery of a ball at Wiltshire to celebrate. In the foyer where he’d once played with Draco there had been blood, and the gardens had been dying, and all he’d felt was fear, his eyes darting over the party looking for allies— Pansy, Vince, Alice, Theo— and finding nothing. But if this was what he wanted, what he’d always been told to want, why was it so terrifying?

He’d thought the Dark Lord might Mark them, but instead they’d been instructed to go back to Hogwarts. Your new Headmaster will need loyal acolytes, he’d said, petting the head of his disgusting snake with those long fingers, and sitting on his right hand at the long table was their Head of House himself. Greg won’t pretend to be the brightest knife in the shed or anything, but Snape seemed like a pretty decent pick, right? There was a thing to how Snape looked at you, in office hours, like it mattered it was you, even if you were, say, Gregory Goyle the Third and potions made about as much sense to as mud. 

The dorm had felt empty, with both Draco and Harry gone and Theo off more often than not on Head Boy duties. Pansy slipped right into the role the Dark Lord had given her, policing something she called the TA, and Vince was actually good at all the hexes the Carrows taught them, but Greg wasn’t and honestly wasn’t sure he wanted to be, missing Draco as the winter closed around the castle like a fist. Missing the kids they used to be, when the game was just insults for the Trio and help with potions homework and going to Slytherin Quidditch matches. When Pansy wasn’t brutal, when Vince wasn’t cruel, when Draco wasn’t gone. 

The year had pooled and snagged around him, most of it going over him— it had taken him six months to realize Undesirable Number One was Harry (which was frankly stupid— he knows he’s not the quickest on the draw, but surely it should be Hermione?) He’d done what the Dark Lord had asked, to the best of his ability— be loyal to Snape. Which, best he could figure, meant doing it like Snape would have done: making sure the homesick first-years didn’t get lost in the maw of the castle, and stopping Smith from hurting scared third years just because he could, and not telling anyone about Vince or Theo or Blaise’s nightmares. Just looking at people like it mattered they were there, no matter what everyone else might think. 

He’d tried to avoid thinking about what the Dark Lord might ask of him after he left Hogwarts. Sometimes, in the low light of the glow-in-the-dark stars of their dorm, he’d find himself hoping that Harry would win after all. After sharing a dorm with him for six years, Greg felt he could testify he was a pretty decent bloke, who didn’t pet massive snakes at dinner parties in blood-stained mansions. And maybe that’s the thought of a traitor, but what had the Dark Lord ever done for him, except send his dad back twitching from meetings, and hurt Draco, and fundamentally misunderstand where the power in the Trio lay? 

He hadn’t meant to fight. He’d sat in the Great Hall, staring at the dark hole in the window Snape had left— hopefully he’s alright— and listened to the Dark Lord demand Harry, watched Ron step up in front of him with a thing to his stance Greg couldn’t help but admire. He’s mine, it said, and did Draco used to feel that way, when he’d stand in front of him? Beside him, Pansy was pulling at Theo’s sleeve, before Theo threw his badge away and crossed the hall, and Pansy had been shocked but Greg hadn’t been, not really. Slytherins stuck together, wasn’t that what Snape had always instilled in them? It wasn’t like Theo was protecting some haughty Gryffindor who thought Slytherins were fundamentally evil— it was Harry, with his quick eyes and bad luck and loyal crew. 

(What had the Dark Lord ever done for them, the six of them in that dorm room, except hunt them and hurt them?)

He hadn’t meant to fight, and then Pansy and Vince and Alice and Tabitha had pealed off from the exodus, Pansy mentioning something about getting Potter, and Greg had followed them, because that was what he’d always done—

And then there they were. The castle rattling around them, the Trio in all their glory wiping blood off their faces, and with them—

“Draco?” Pansy had asked, incredulous, and he didn’t have gel in his hair, and he was wearing a muggle jumper and looked like he’d just seen a ghost, but it was him. Pansy raised her wand, followed by Vince and Alice and Tabitha, but Greg had felt all the unease that had surrounded him this past year solidify all at once. If Draco had picked the Trio, he would pick the Trio. And he’d never been that good at expelliarmus, but Pansy also never saw it coming. 

He hadn’t meant to fight, and then there he’d been, standing with the Trio and Draco looking down at the stunned forms of his friends. “Good to have you, mate,” Ron had said, and Harry had a distant look to him but had given him a nod, and Draco had gone in for the hug— I missed you, he’d muttered, close in when no one else could hear. He hadn’t meant to fight but then there the battle was, and he’d dodged bricks and knocked black-robbed figures into walls and dug people out of the rubble and stood there in the cease-fire over Solomon’s limp form, everything ringing in his ears.

But Solomon had come back in gold to stand in front of Draco when Harry had done whatever he’d done (they’d been saying Harry had been dead, but there he was— it didn’t make a lot of sense, but he supposes Harry should get to be lucky every now and again), while in front of him stood a man who looked like him and like his father— the very first Gregory Goyle. 

And now the Dark Lord’s dead, and his dad is in prison, and his mum is in Germany with some distant cousin of hers, and Vince and Pansy and Alice and Tabitha and Smith are in the holding cells at the Ministry— they’ll get community service, probably, Lady Tonks had said, which Greg doesn’t know how to feel about, just like he doesn’t know how to feel about his dad going to prison for the rest of his life, or his mum just leaving without making sure he was okay. Just like he doesn’t know how to feel about Manchester, or Draco demanding he come home with him, or the buses, or the muggle market with the fruit. 

(He knows how he feels about Solomon dead, though, and maybe that’s something at least. The way the grief burns and burns and burns, reminding him he’s still alive.)

“I want to be mad at them, for picking him over me,” says Draco; it’s early June and above them the clouds are like sheep, the narrow back garden of the row house overgrown with vines. His hair is neatly combed, but he’s wearing muggle clothes, and the Prophet this morning was reporting details about his dad’s trial. He rubs his hand along his forearm, and Greg hasn’t asked how he got it off— probably Lady Malfoy, right? She’s scary when she wants to be. “But I— how could they have said no?” He turns his pale eyes on Greg with an intensity he used to reserve for insults to Harry. “How did you say no?”

(Greg thinks about the wide lawns at Malfoy Manor, before the Dark Lord came back, and how Draco would always pick him for his teams. He thinks about sixth-year, when Harry and Theo and Draco alike would have nightmares, and they’d just figured it out themselves, six Slytherins against the world. He thinks about that awful party at Wiltshire, where the Dark Lord had dismissed him as just another disposable minion, a done-deal of a Death Eater.)

(He thinks about how Draco had looked at him, standing in the corridor as the battle had been building. And he knows he’s not the brightest tool in the box, but there had been something in the way he’d looked at them all, the people who’d once been his friends. A question.)

“He didn’t ask me,” says Greg. “You did.”

Draco lets out a long breath and leans his forehead into Greg’s shoulder. Above them, the swallows swing low as the afternoon thunderstorm builds, and from inside the house Teddy lets out a high-pitched shriek of laughter. “I think,” says Greg slowly. “That he might have been an idiot.”

Draco lets out a slight wet chuckle. “You know what, Greg? I think you’re right.” 

______________

In the dreams, he’s back in the cloister of the year, like being held down in deep water. Gunpowder, explosions; the silica haze after they’d dynamited a sculpture the new regime had installed in the magical section of Liverpool decrying muggles; reeling back from a blow from Amycus, blood in his mouth and a grin on the bastard’s face. He’s back on the bridge, seeing Ginny run towards them, only she never comes back up from her leap; he’s dueling back to back with Kellah in the foyer, only when he turns around she’d dead on the floor, blood trickling from her mouth and her eyes dull. He feels the bolt of AK coming towards him, heavy like a scythe; in real life, the very castle itself threw a wall between it and him, took the blast into its marrow; in the dream—

He always wakes up before it hits him, jolting upright to an early June thunderstorm shaking the manor, breathing hard in the high thread-count sheets. A quick survey: the nerve damage to his left hand healing nicely (Alecto had managed that in the middle of the battle, and Kellah had killed her for it, and he’s still jealous of that); the Creevy signet ring on his finger, freed of the glamours; the soft snores of both Dennis and Astoria, who have taken to sleeping in here. Outside, the night goes white and shivering with lightning, and Colin slumps into himself, putting his head between his knees and feeling the wand he’s been legally allowed to use for three days against his forearm.

We did it, he reminds himself. He walks back through the final scene of the battle: pressed up against the stone wall of the Great Hall with Ernie MacMillian on one side and Daphne on the other, his heart in his mouth— Harry’s dead, what now— watching their friends and teachers duel Bellatrix and Voldemort. 

And then Bellatrix, dead. And then Harry and Ron and Hermione there, like they’d been when he’d first come to school and all he could think was Harry Potter! like a useless fan-boy. Colin had forgotten to be afraid, with the Trio standing between Voldemort and the rest of the hall, like the Gryffindors they could have been: you can’t have them unless you go through us. 

Harry had talked to the Dark Lord like he was an idiot, chin high and eyes gleaming, and then volo— 

Colin runs his hands over each other. Hermione had given them a primer before the battle, walked them through the theory, of how to cast her counter to block the unblockable. To his knowledge, none of them had cast it in the throes of it— sure, it was Hermione, and so it was probably a work of pure genius, but it was also avada. Some laws were immutable, surely.

(And how much had he really wanted to live, pealing off from the students being escorted out and joining the skirmish anyway? After the year they’d had, all spit blood and rubble and fear, maybe that was how it was always supposed to end, in a bolt of green. If that was what it took to save the world, wasn’t it worth it?)

He focuses on Dennis and Astoria’s breathing in the dark, tries to let it steady him. He remembers Harry describing building a patronus back when he’d been a fourth year, in the mirrored room— focus on what you love, who you love— and tries to do the same thing here. I want to live, he tells himself, but even with the war won it feels flimsy, somehow. 

It’s not that he wants to die, he thinks, floating through the days in the aftermath— currying the horses; flinching from sudden movements; up late wandering the garden in the twilight. It’s just that there’s a part of him that feels like maybe he shouldn’t have made it out. He didn’t want a bolt of green, in the final fight. But if that had been the price, to save his world? There would have been something clean and elegant about that, maybe. 

He goes through the motions, like a blue-blood who’s also a wizard. Lets his mum insist on house calls from muggle doctors who can’t treat the crucio damage; lets her come with him to St. Mungo’s to see people who can. Sits up late with his dad late at night, whiskey untouched, trying to explain the whole thing, but still somehow unable to explain how much it hurt. When he started at Hogwarts, he had a whole posse, a dorm full of rowdy troublemakers, but somewhere in the war they began to drift, and now his closest friends are Seamus and Dean, Lavender and Kellah, Ginny and Dez. They come over for afternoons, but then they leave, and he goes back around to knocking about the house, itching at the scars from the year.

So when Kenneth Spencer rings him up one evening in June— Kenneth Spencer, who’d gone to Eton just like he was supposed to, who could have given Draco a run for his money; Kenneth Spencer who’d bought the lie his parents had sold, about the experimental art school and yet hadn’t let it bother him— and invites him to come over, for what can only be a party on a holiday weekend while his parents are in the Maldives, Colin says yes, and shows up with nicked whiskey and a jumper to hide his wand holster.

He feels small, somehow, and out of his depth, standing in the marble foyer surrounded by the kids who used to be his friends, so long ago it feels like a fever dream. “Mate, we haven’t seen you in forever!” calls Kevin Marsh, a forty in hand; David St. Clair, who has perfect teeth and looks just like his father, nods at him; Griffen Citrine gives him a two-fingered salute while Kenneth himself busies himself by handing him a pint.

“Good to have you back, Creevy,” he says. “You’ll have to tell us all about your art school. Chiefly: the girls.”

Colin, unable to think of anything but Lavender twitching on the floor of the main hall before Millie had arrived like a whirlwind and gotten her to the infirmary (she’s fine, you saw her last week, he tells himself) forces a shaky smile on his face, and chugs the pint, which elicits whoops all around.

He lets himself fall. 

The night tumbles around him, all jump-cuts, sudden shifts. The stale taste of beer. Kenneth bragging about making striker on the Eton team. David and Richard and Kevin start a bonfire on the back patio and he has to slip off to the bushes to vomit, which maybe is the alcohol and maybe is the final battle, how Hogwarts had looked all wreathed in flames. The boys are swapping stories about their prestigious boarding schools, the girls they’ve shagged and the liquor they’ve drunk and Colin— Colin doesn’t—

I’ve spent the last year fighting a war, he wants to tell them, as Kenneth describes in lurid detail his trysts with the girl he’s been seeing on and off. I’ve killed people. 

It’s when the boys start in on the firecrackers while drunk to hell that he finds himself locking himself in a third story bathroom, sobbing into his knees. They’re too far gone to miss him anyway, and he’s too drunk to apparate home, and is that his patronus?

He looks away from the silvery pheasant, trailing spectral feathers on the marble tile, to the wand in his hand. Supposed to be uncannily difficult magic, but hey, Harry had been the best DADA teacher they’d ever had. “I want to go home,” he tells it. “Can you go get someone who’ll take me home?”

The silvery bird winks out, and he vomits into the bathtub again, head on the porcelain and the battle before his eyes. 

He isn’t sure how long it is before there’s a rapping at the door, followed by a sharp alohamora. Colin raises his head from the bathtub and then does a double take. There were a lot of people he would have assumed his patronus would have gotten— Ginny probably at the top of the list— but instead he’s met with the uncannily odd sight of Theodore Nott in muggle jeans and jumper, wand out, surveying the room for threats. 

“You?” asks Colin in lieu of anything better. 

“Me,” says Theo, but without the edge he sometimes packs in there. “Are you too drunk for a side-along? I could probably manage a portkey but I’m no Hermione.”

Colin realizes, with the clarity only drunks are afforded, that he has been making a grave error in all his lists for the past year, because Theodore Nott, despite everything, is absolutely his friend, and the fact that he came home with him, paranoid and flighty though he is, says it all.

“Side-along’s fine,” says Colin, though he does fall to his knees in the grass outside of his manor, and vomit into the grass. Theo Vanishes it with a wave and then makes him sit down, conjures water. 

“I don’t have any Sober-Up potions,” he says, as they sit in the dark overlooking the pond and the rose gardens. “If you’d wanted that, you should have gotten Daphne.” 

Colin spreads his shaking hand on the grass and raises his eyes to the quarter moon and takes a long sip of the water, wiping off his mouth with the back of his hand. “I didn’t— I just sent it to get someone.” He chances a glance over at Theo, who has his arms wrapped around his knee, his eyes like wells in the gloom. “Not that I didn’t want you,” Colin tries to clarify. “I just—“

He doesn’t mean to tell Theo everything, exactly, but it comes spilling out all the same— the strangeness of the party, the way he’d felt so viscerally wrong— they were just kids, talking about sexual exploits and football and homework and he’d fought a war and nothing would ever be the same again. 

At long last, after several refills and the spinning dulling a bit, he falls silent. The moon has sunk, leaving only the stars behind, and the wards leave the taste of Daphne’s magic, like snow and pewter, in the back of his throat. The silence lingers for so long he starts to think Theo isn’t going to say anything, is just going to take all these secrets to the grave, but then his voice punctures the night like a knife. 

“The summer before Hogwarts,” he says, and something about his voice makes Colin, even drunk to shit in the grass, go still, with the weight of this story. “I went to Pansy’s eleventh birthday party. She was obsessed with unicorns. Her father had gotten a herd there, somehow. Classic pureblood, more money than sense type shit. You know it.” Colin nods, unable to risk a glance at him, in case he’s reminded he’s telling this story. 

“Pansy was a little princess. Draco was telling anyone who could listen about how he was going to make it on the House team. Greg and Vince had snuck into the kitchens and stolen cake.” Theo flexes his hand, and the night colors with the scent of his magic, lavender and salt. “All I could think about was how in fifty-eight days I’d be at Hogwarts instead of that fucking house.”

Oh, thinks Colin, through a roaring in his ears. Of course he would understand.

“We won,” says Theo, with some soft awe at the core of his voice and Colin wonders how long it will be before they both really believe it. “And now I guess we’re going to figure out what to do with it.”

He falls asleep on some guest bed Theo guides him too, wakes up dizzy and achy and reeking of vomit, but Daphne brews a mean hangover relief potion and there’s fresh fruit for breakfast. Theo doesn’t say anything, and Kenneth leaves a voicemail— wicked night, mate, see you at the next one— that he doesn’t know how to respond to, and Astoria and Dennis have their heads together at the end of the table, concocting some scheme. 

The Hat had never even considered Slytherin. Gryffindor and done with it, like any cheeky peerage kid unable to see the flaws of the new world would be. But he’s not that kid anymore; he’s seventeen with scars and nightmares about war. 

Theo’s eyes meet his across the table, cool and heavy, like a friend. He spins the Creevy signet on his finger, which he never intends to hide again, and watches Dennis laugh in response to one of Astoria’s clever inside jokes, watches Daphne slip a piece of buttered toast onto Theo’s plate without looking up from the Prophet she’s devouring. 

The Hat had never even considered Slytherin, but here he is, seventeen and with the war won. What would it look like, to figure out how to live?

______________

She tries to focus on the facts, because the facts are simpler. The Dark Lord is dead. Her friends are alive. She’s alive, probably because Susan Bones hadn’t let her be an idiot— Lisa, your speciality is runes— and so she’d blanketed the country house the student body had taken shelter in with a conclave of them, so that if everything fell and the Dark Lord did come after them, they’d at least have an edge.

But he hadn’t come. Harry had killed him. Harry had killed him, and now they had to figure out what to do next.

It’s pouring in Sheffield, cricket on the telly and her runes books stacked up on the floor next to her as she finally empties her trunk. Over the past month, since the war ended, she’s gotten more mail than she ever has in her life— long letters from Megan; book recs from Terry; follow-ups about volo from Hermione; and countless asks from various runic professionals asking if perhaps she would like to study with them. Technically, she has the trappings of a mastery already— she had been supposed to spend seventh year putting it together— but it had all come apart when the Ministry had fallen.

Not that it had really mattered. She’d had enough to do anyway. 

Lisa piles books out from her trunk onto the floor, smooths out old pieces of parchment, tries to follow the side trails of her and Terry and Babbling’s notes, intermingled at times with Theo’s scrawl and Sue’s opinions and a few comments from Daphne or Anthony or Morag, or some reference Flitwick thought might be useful (he’d usually been right). Had she or Terry gone to a single class last year? They’d gone to Prefect meetings, Daphne pacing with a gleam in her eyes; they’d gone to the study room that had used to be Anthony’s, sticky with Hermione’s best wards like petrichor and charcoal; they’d gone to Millie’s magnificent Come-and-Go room variation as Headquarters, falling asleep at the round study table after one too many all-nighters. They’d gone to the infirmary, sometimes with the little Ravenclaw first years that were sick from fear, or with the brash sixth years who’d picked fights with the Carrows— Susanna Yaxley had actually had the sheer gall to raise her hand while Alecto was going on and on about how Voldemort was the greatest wix of the age and go isn’t it actually Hermione Granger, ma’am— and sometimes just as themselves, exhausted or bleeding or just needing to be somewhere away from the oppressive darkness Snape was fostering in the castle halls. 

They hadn’t gone to a single class, but they’d also helped solve the most complicated problem in modern magical theory. If Lisa hadn’t been in awe of Hermione before, she was after this year— it was one thing to always have the right answers in class and cast magic far above your academic level. It was another thing entirely to come back from the firmaments with something brilliant, something innovative, something that broke every fundamental assumption about how magic worked and put it back together again. The idea wasn’t me, Hermione had explained, in one of the letters the beautiful snowy owl had delivered, I never would have just thought about pitting how much I wanted to live against how much someone wanted to kill me. 

The idea wasn’t hers, which— Lisa supposes make sense, because who would have thought of that? Even after working on volo for a year, she’s not sure she could actually manage to cast it— not well enough for it to work, at least, not against someone like Voldemort. It’s not that she wants to die, or anything, it’s just— it’s just loose, she guesses. Like staying and fighting, or going to the manor house and warding the hell out of it. Like the entire war, crinkling and trembling in the margins.

(The Carrows hadn’t noticed that she and Terry and Sue never showed up to classes. Snape never seemed to, either. Daphne had though, Daphne and Theo and Susan Bones and Hannah Abbott. And Hermione had sent her a message, through Sue: I think runes are the way to solve this problem, but you’re better than me. And so there it had been, the choice.)

(Nothing to do with ethics, maybe, or being good. Just Megan, finding her in the library, making sure she ate. Just Hermione’s questions on her notes, her little notations, her brilliant mind. Just Terry at her elbow, always working, always striving. How they wanted her, when no one else had ever seemed to, and it hadn’t mattered all those years in the Ravenclaw tower, when school had just been an excuse to delve into runes and acquire knowledge, but then there the war had been and it had, it had—)

Sitting on the flood in Sheffield with the rain coming down all around, she wants to say that she would have always chosen this, always sided with Hermione and Harry and Ron; always helped defeat Voldemort. But—

But her mother by blood had died a loyal Death Eater. But a rune problem was a rune problem, and the Dark Lord had never exactly done anything to her. If he’d come knocking, lauding her work and asking for an acolyte, would she really have said no?

All those years ago, the Hat hadn’t even hesitated. Kid, I can feel your hunger everywhere, and Ravenclaw it had been. She’s never been good or bad, never brave or charismatic, just ravenous, and what does that make her? There’s not really a moral compass in her chest as much as is there is a vague constellation of people she thinks she has something like affection for. Her parents; Megan and Terry; maybe even Hermione and Sue and Theo. 

She made the right call, this time. But what if next time, some dark lord comes knocking at her door, with promises of unlimited runic knowledge and quiet libraries and she chooses wrong? She doesn’t want to be evil, but she’s not quite sure she knows how to be good. 

“Sure you do,” says Megan, as they pace on the wide central green of Leicester. She had stayed to fight and nearly payed for it with her life, but Millie had saved her when she’d been flung off the astronomy tower. Her hair is up in a complex braid, and with her arms bare because of the heat, Lisa can see the hideous burn that Alecto gave her last year.

(No avadas, probably, from someone like her. Never will get the chance to find out now, she hopes. But every time she sees the scar on her best friend’s arm, her chest peels open and there it is, just waiting. All that need, like a river.)

“You do runes, you go on walks with your friends, you eat when I nag you about it, you have Mastery students, me and Terry come to all your conferences on nerd rune things, you come to mine for Christmas dinner, you’re in my wedding— normal shit.”

Lisa licks her lips, the ordinary nature of such a future somehow elusive, like a dream bleeding out over breakfast. She doesn’t feel like she would say this to anyone else, but it’s Megan, her only friend for most of her Hogwarts career; Megan, who had forgiven the fact that she hadn’t written a single letter last year with such ease, such warmth. “If he’d recruited me,” she says, fast, the words tripping over each other. “I don’t know if I would have said no.” Megan comes to a halt, her dark eyes fixed on her, and Lisa forces her voice onwards. “If he’d— if it had been him instead of all of you—“

“He didn’t move fast enough, though,” says Megan, her voice low and even, and her brown hand is interlaced with Lisa’s pale one all at once. “He didn’t think it mattered, what you are. The things you can do. The way you move. Hermione and Sue and Terry and me did.”

“But if he’d—“

“He would have recruited you and Terry and Anthony and Sue and Hermione and won the fucking war,” says Megan, no hesitation. “He would hav e had you guys working on something brilliant instead of volo, and no offense to Harry and Ron, but—“

Lisa, from what little she has seen of Harry and Ron, likes them well enough, and knows, with absolutely certainty, that if Voldemort had gotten his claws in all of their year in Ravenclaw, they wouldn’t have stood a chance. 

Underneath the overcast Leicester sky, a couple is having a picnic; two dads have brought their children to play cricket, and Lisa can tell from here one of them is quite good. A mother pushes a baby in a pram, and a man in a suit bustles by with a briefcase, in a hurry. Lisa feels a great rush of air leave her lungs, like surfacing from a pool. “If someone else comes,” she says. “And tries to recruit me, and they’re awful—“

“I’ll get there first,” says Megan. “I promise.”

Lisa falls asleep on the floor of Megan’s bedroom, and dreams of runes and the country house and how after the battle when they were waiting for the train, she and Terry had distracted their House with speculation on how the castle had worked. When she wakes early, she writes a equations in long hand on stray parchment the Joneses left lying around their kitchen, and Megan and her sister both are there at breakfast, so ruthlessly alive it hurts, and the sun spills like an egg yolk over the future. 

______________

He changes his outfit six times on the walk from Diagon to the pub, on-the-fly transfiguration solutions based on what he sees the muggles wearing. He wants to look like he fits in, and he wants to look good, and his hands are shaking. Of course the Trio would want to meet at some scuzzy muggle pub, he thinks, and then instantly regrets it— they were the three most famous people in the wizarding world right now, they obviously didn’t want to meet in Diagon where every five seconds someone would be coming up to them, thanking them profusely or maybe weeping.

Or maybe they just didn’t want to be seen with me in Diagon, Draco thinks, and then feels guilty about that one too. If they didn’t want to be seen with him, they didn’t have to— no one had forced Harry to send Hedwig (who, if the rumors were true, had evaded a large portion of the Death Eater Corp for the entirety of the war) with a quick note asking to meet for a pint. 

The mid-June light is like topaz, smears of pinking clouds in the distance and the acrid exhaust from the buses. The puddles are filthy, and Draco is a bit proud of the non-verbal water-repelling charm he manages on his boots. His magic has been coming more freely to him these days, like he’s come out of a long sickness, and the place where the Mark was doesn’t itch anymore. He doesn’t think he’s felt this solid, this whole, since fourth-year, when he was Seeker for Slytherin since Harry was indisposed and his father was still his hero and since Granger (can he call her Hermione now?) was so busy trying to help Harry with the tournament, he’d actually felt like he had a shot at getting top marks. 

(He got the letter, about going back to Hogwarts, and he thought about it for longer than he’d like to admit, out in the back garden while Teddy was down for his nap. Hogwarts before the Dark Lord had ruined it was like a thing out of a dream— his little circle of co-conspirators in the Slytherin common room; the way the stones bleed magic; his and Harry’s rivalry, back when it was fun. But then Greg had come out with his clutched in his hand, looking a bit mournful— I wasn’t ever going to pass my NEWTs, but I suppose it’s nice they offered— and the afternoon had turned into brainstorming what exactly Greg would do, now that he wasn’t at Hogwarts. He probably was good enough to make reserve Beater for some team or another; Draco personally thought he’d do pretty well as a bouncer, or the kind of construction where you couldn’t use magic. Or maybe I could open a bar, Greg had said, staring off into the distance, his face creased in thought. My parents would hate that.)

(Both their fathers were probably going to prison for the foreseeable future; Greg’s father, at least, was not evil was much as he was careless with his loyalty. Draco doesn’t know how to feel about his father’s sins, or how somehow Greg had chosen him over the Dark Lord. He still has nightmares about that summer at Wiltshire, and the Dark Lord was evil, of course he was evil, but was also intoxicating, like a black hole. If he wanted you, he got you.)

(Except what was he against Millicent Bulstrode, Ron Weasley, Harry Potter, Hermione fucking Granger? Except apparently he hadn’t thought to ask Greg, and Draco had, and somehow, that had been enough.)

He tweaks his jeans based on a passing muggle, letting them go from blue to black, which matches his overall aesthetics better. He’s embarrassingly nervous about this meeting— in the Room of Requirement, at the height of the battle, Ron had mentioned something about a beer after all of it was over, but he hadn’t taken him seriously. 

But the Trio don’t do things by halves, he’s learning.

When he steps into the place he feels Harry’s eyes on him, in that instinctual way they used to track each other when they were children still. He’s sitting in the corner booth, Hermione on one side; Ron is at the bar, waiting for the drinks. They look like regular blokes out for a pint on Friday night, the pub busy but not oppressive. Harry raises a hand to him, and he slinks across the space, sits down opposite Harry and Hermione, trying not to wilt under the weight of their attention. 

“Got you a pint, mate,” says Ron, sliding it across the table to him and then cramming in next to Hermione. “Figured you wouldn’t be too posh for it.”

He thinks he might be, secretly— the only alcohol he’s ever had was when he was at Pansy’s for Easter fourth year and she knew where the key to the liquor cabinet was (he’d known better to try at Wiltshire, his mum’s wards could draw blood)— but he takes a sip anyway, trying to not to grimace. 

“I don’t think I’ve had any either,” says Hermione, staring at the foam. “Last year was just all nicked liquor from Grimmauld.”

“Justin had me try one in Reading the other summer,” says Harry, pulling his closer. In close quarters, without the fervor of the battle, Draco can pick out the scars on his fingers, and is that—

“Potter, what the hell is that on your hand?” he asks. 

Harry starts, and then looks down at his hand, a shadow passing over his face. He raises it to Draco, who can pick out— are those words?

“‘I must not tell lies,’” says Harry. “Umbridge made me do it in detentions fifth year with a blood quill.”

It’s the casual way that he’s talking about it that unnerves Draco so much, and he feels his jaw drop open. “Pardon?” he says. 

“No way she came and fought,” says Ron, taking a long sip of his beer. “I haven’t seen anything in the office about tracking her down, but we should.”

“I’ll ask Anthony,” says Hermione, something in her expression promising murder. 

“Don’t worry about it,” says Harry to Draco, as if any of that made any sense. “Only actually hurt the first time; Snape gave me numbing potions. How have you been?”

This has opened up an entire new avenue of questions about what he didn’t see during their years at Hogwarts, and it takes him an embarrassing amount of time to refocus, over look the Trio’s casualness. “I’m doing well,” he says slowly. Hermione lifts her beer, takes a small sip, and then makes a face, and there’s something so odd about seeing her like this, when all these years she’s just been Granger, untouchable, brilliant. All of this is surreal, actually— the muggle music coming in over the wireless; all of the Trio sitting across from him, being civil, like that’s what they do; the fact that the Dark Lord is dead and it’s just over, now. “Teddy’s sleeping through the night, so that’s something.”

Harry’s face lights up at the mention of him— right, he’s one of the godfathers, isn’t he— and Draco tries to explain his living situation while skirting the best he can around his father. Harry’s staying with Snape, apparently, which— not a subject Draco knows how to broach.

(He has memories of the man from childhood, sitting sallow in the salon with the other friends of his father, or sitting out at the koi pond with his mother. Offering him a rare corner of a smile. Except his father had always made it clear, from the beginning, that Snape was not like them. He serves his purposes, his father had said; the memory is smokey, disgusting. But he is at best a tool. He will bow to our whims, when pressure is applied in the correct places.)

(But Snape was never a tool; Snape had, if Harry is to be believed, played the Dark Lord the entire time and helped them win the war.)

“I— I assume you’re not going back to Hogwarts, next year?” he asks, thinking of the letter that’s still sitting on his nightstand. He had realized last night, nervous about the pint and staring at the ceiling, that the allure of Hogwarts was the allure of childhood, which had ended after fifth year, when he’d come back to a haunted house. Going back now, after everything— after the battle, and the dead—

“God no,” says Harry. “You?” 

Draco shakes his head. “I— I don’t even know what that would look like. Greg’s talking about maybe trying to get an apartment in Diagon, but I don’t know.”

“Well, if you don’t have anything else going on, I will need some help writing up the arithmancy for volo,” says Hermione, briskly, which makes the boys groan. “I’d like to get it published—“

“No shop talk at dinner, ‘Mione,” says Ron, as if he’s reciting a sacred rule, and then he takes a large swig of beer. “You and Draco can schedule an arithmancy date some other time.” 

Hermione elbows Ron, but she’s grinning, and gives Draco a wink. “Some time this week. I need you to walk me through your process on the Eulerian shift you did on the coefficients. You’d have co-author credit, obviously.”

“Obviously,” says Ron, and Hermione throws another elbow at him. Draco is too busy staring at the table of all of a sudden, that stuffy Pureblood instinct to hide the smile blooming across his face. Harry nudges the beer closer to him. 

It tastes like shit, but he drinks it fast enough to let a buzz settle in his veins. The conversation opens up slowly— Ron and Harry have joined the Aurors, just to help with the aftermath of the war; Hermione is trying to choose between Mastery programs and the boys are trying to talk her into doing two or three at once. Draco—

There’s no Mark on his arm, but there’s also no Heir ring on his finger. He rubs at the spot it had used to sit, ever since he’d started at Hogwarts. It’s sitting on the dresser at the row house, where it’s sat ever since his father turned himself in, and the family name splashed across all the papers made him feel, for the first time, ashamed of what it meant. 

(Because he’s glad his father is alive, glad he didn’t die in the final battle. But also the part of him that had always believed his father to be invincible, the man who would do anything for him, fix anything, had shattered when the Dark Lord had put the Mark on his arm because of him. Because his father had chosen a maniac. And he’d tried to believe it all, tried to want what it meant, but—)

(But at the end of the day, the Dark Lord was a killer who wanted to hurt people, and his father had killed and hurt right along side him. In the name of blood purity, sure, but what good was that shit, when he had the brightest wix of the age sitting across from him with not a drop of magical blood?)

The war is over. There is no future in the Ministry, some Wizengmont seat and political play like his father had groomed him for. (Like all the other seats belonging to confirmed Death Eaters, the Malfoy one will sit empty until there’s a Lord without a Mark on their arm.) There’s just— “I was thinking about Masteries too,” he says, before he thinks it through, and Hermione’s eyes light up. 

“Arithmancy, I assume?” she asks, leaning across the table; Ron stands wordlessly and heads back to the bar. “Have you been thinking about Boone at Cambridge, or Monticello at Glasgow? Flitwick will have contacts I’m sure— Sato is apparently doing something really impressive with finite volume methods, Sue keeps trying to get me to read the papers—“

Ron comes back with four more beers, which gives Harry just enough room to get a word in edgewise. “Forget about arithmancy for a minute. Draco, tell me you think the Canons are still going to be at the bottom of the league.”

“Honestly!” says Hermione; Ron looks equally offended, but for different reasons— “Mate, like I keep telling you, we won the war, that’s got to have broken the curse—“

Sitting with the Trio as the night falls, bickering about arithmancy and Quidditch and Wizengmont seats, everything feels cleaner somehow. Easier. He doesn’t have to think about finding Solomon’s body, stone cold dead from an avada; doesn’t have to think about the long list of crimes the Prophet had reported his father had admitted to (his mother had tried to hide the article, but he’d duplicated the paper and read it anyway and then regretted it); doesn’t have to think about what he’s going to do instead of going back to Hogwarts. Hermione in close quarters is a joy; Ron’s jokes are good when he lets himself laugh at them; Harry, when Draco’s not being caustic to him, is magnanimous, unbothered, kind. 

The quest comes out in bits and pieces, as they drink more, and Draco can’t hide the horror on his face about the Horcruxes. About the Trio having to do it all on their own. Several drinks in, the words just slither out, all his decorum gone— “I wish I could have been more help.”

Some kind of strange smile slithers across Harry’s face for a moment; outside a thin mist has set in. “Thank you, Draco.”

“You were there when we needed you,” says Ron. “That’s something.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to put the arithmancy together without you,” says Hermione, seriously. “Thank you.”

When he walks out, at one am with the street gauzy and his head spinning, it’s to claps on the back from the Trio, and an invitation to Sunday brunch and scrimmage at the Burrow, and an appointment to talk arithmancy with Hermione, and he thinks the buzz isn’t all from the alcohol. 

His dad is in prison, and probably will be for a very long time, and he doesn’t know what to do with that. The future is still a hazy maze. But maybe, just maybe, he’s got another shot at something he fucked up when he was eleven and an absolute prat. 

He promises himself he won’t mess it up this time.

______________

(In the future, Dean ducks his way in and out of the magical world like a ghost. He buys season tickets for the Harpies; he meets Kellah in Diagon for a pint when she’s back from Auror missions; he helps Seamus out in his franchise of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes in Dublin on occasion. Magic is just another thing he can do, like kicking around the football and cooking up eggs; sometimes he needs it, sometimes he doesn’t. As the years bleed into each other and the assistant coaching gig for the kiddies turns into one for Truro City FC, he thinks less and less about going back, about trying to make himself fit in a world he could have done just fine without. He has his friends; he has his city.)

(And, when he’s twenty-four, and one of his casual girlfriends ends up pregnant, he has Lydia. Lydia’s mum only sticks around for two years, so he and his mum raise her, with Seamus chipping in like a brother and Lav and Kellah as the fun aunties. She’ll have Quidditch posters in her room, and will play football with a vicious glee, and when the Hogwarts letter comes, Dean will try not to cry. Mate, it’ll be okay, Seamus will say, up on the hill again, fifteen years and change between them and that day when the war had just ended. The liquor still tastes like shit. It won’t be like it was for us. We made sure of it.)

(In the years to come, Lavender will get to know Amanda Pryor. Amanda Pryor, who could have left but didn’t; Amanda Pryor, quick on the draw in a fight and also a damn good primary school teacher. They meet for coffee on the Continent, as Lavender attempts a Mastery in Divination that doesn’t quite go as planned; they meet in the pubs in Diagon when she’s back and decides to go in with Padma and Emma on their modern clothing line for witches; they meet up in Hogsmeade, when Trelawny has her fill in for a year while she’s on sabbatical. She has her mother’s laugh, and her thin fingers, and the verve for life— fighters through and through, the both of them. Getting to know her is like coming home.)

(The sisterhood will stretch and shift, as they get older— Leanne marries a kind, sensible muggle plumber; Emma adopts three cats and Kellah joins the Aurors; Padma marries Morag and Parv moves to New Delhi for a Mastery in Charms. Lavender, for her part, will drift in and out of relationships—  a fling with Colin, when they are six months out from the war and everything feels caustic and brittle; a few of Ginny’s teammates on the Harpies; when they are twenty-three, for a whirlwind handful of months, Blaise Zabini. None of them end poorly, exactly, but maybe she’s still trying to put herself together again, unwilling or unable to let the men see the scars. But at the seaside with the girls, she sheds her shirt and lets the sun sparkle on the keratin Greyback left her with— this love, she knows, will hold through any storm.)

(Later, Greg will find a flat in London that is convenient to the job Draco finds him, working as a bar back in some dive in Knockturn, and he’ll let Draco and Luna do all the decorating. But he’ll always come back for Sunday lunch at the row house in Manchester, help Ted out in the garden, try to follow Teddy’s incoherent thoughts, let Mr. Lupin help him with some spell that isn’t going quite right. The Goyle Manor is repossessed by the Ministry, and though he’ll visit his father in prison and his mother will write him occasional Christmas cards, he takes Ingrid’s last name, and there is no Gregory Goyle the Fourth.)

(There is a Gregory Draco Scamander, though.)

(And it will be years before he gets the collect floo call, years and years of rebuffs and cold shoulders and nightmares about seventh year, but he shows up all the same, pays bail, and sits across from Vince in his bar in Knockturn. The years will have done him no favors, in and out of jail for petty crimes, but in another life Greg would have made a damn good Hufflepuff, and the love is still there, just waiting. I’m sorry, Vince will say, picking at the table with his scarred hands. I don’t want your apologies, Greg will tell him. I want my friend back, and slowly, slowly, they’ll pick their way back up of the wreckage.)

(Later on, ideas for the future will come to Colin, like the dawn spilling across the landscape. Dez will drag him to Diagon, have him pick up a new camera to replace the one that got smashed in the maw of the Carrows, and then they’ll go to training matches for the Harpies and he’ll frame Ginny against the sky, all grin and teeth. He isn’t expecting the pictures to sell, but the Prophet’s main sports photographer turned out to be a die-hard Voldemort loyalist, and there is a joy, clean and bright, in doing something so bereft of evil. He will never see Kenneth Spencer again, but eventually he’ll be a groomsman in Theo’s wedding, and maybe that was what they won the war for, to see everyone standing in the spring light, laughing.)

(And when he sends the kids off to Hogwarts, he sends them with the Creevy name and a signet ring and a story, about why he fought a war. A story they’ll never quite be able to grasp, because there won’t be wars for them— only pictures that move, and the giant squid, and friendship— and that was the point all along, wasn’t it?)

(Still to come: the papers Lisa will publish, as she comes into her own, cutting a swath through the conventions of runes. Co-authors are Granger, Boot, Flitwick, sometimes even Li. She and Megan rent a flat in London, Megan working for the Ministry in International Corporation and perfecting her cakes in her free time, and Lisa flooing to the major runic libraries and conferences, and so what if Terry is over a lot? It doesn’t mean anything until they’re twenty-six, leaning over a notes for their joint talk the next day in a hotel bar in Helsinki, and then they’re kissing, and Lisa will realize all at once that she doesn’t want to stop.)

(No one tries to recruit her, for some war or monstrosity, but Megan is there anyway, reading her papers, attending her conferences, maid of honor at the wedding. Is she good, is she evil; does it matter, after all of this, when she had Mastery students and cricket on the wireless and Megan’s children call her auntie?)

(Later, their afternoon discussion on the volo arithmancy will become more papers, will become co-authorship, will become Hermione making international portkeys just to workshop equations with him in the Tokyo fall while Draco finishes his Mastery with Sato. They’ll be twenty-one, then, and Hermione will have gotten three Masteries in as many years, and he’ll still need another year to finish up his first, but it won’t bother him like it did when they were back in school. There will simply be the sounds of traffic, and the fall light on her hair and the way she looks up at him with the quill poised, just waiting for his input, like it matters that it’s him.)

(And how was he supposed to know quickly one brunch invite to the Burrow would turn into something like friendship? But the years peel away from each other like pages, and there he is at nineteen, playing Chaser with Harry and Millie as Krum and Ginny chase the snitch like maniacs even though it’s just a friendly. There he is at twenty, over at the Trio’s flat for diner on a stormy August night, and when he gets too drunk to apparate home, they just transfigure the couch, and Ron makes waffles in the morning. There he is at twenty-two, and when he publishes his dissertation, Molly Weasley and his mother put aside centuries of bad blood to throw a party for him. Standing in the back garden of the row house in high summer, as Teddy chases Victoire in circles and Harry talks to Auntie Andi while Susan teases Tonks about her newest paramour— the star Keeper on the Harpies— and Greg and Luna talk in a pitched whispers about the newest Quibbler article, subconsciously his hand will find the slot on his arm, but it’s not there, hasn’t been for years now. All is well.)

(And years and years later, when the time comes and they end up at King’s Cross, sending children off to Hogwarts, they’ll look them in the eyes, see them as the are. Clever and brave; smart and loyal. All of them eleven, magic in their fists and the future a corridor of potential, but none of the doors lead to wars, or graveyards, or that hideous mark on their arm. What House? the kids will ask, and the years will roll back— not to the sorting, but to the final battle, to the silica in the air and the castle moving and the bodies laid out on the flagstones— and the answer will be automatic, instinctual.)

(It doesn’t matter, they’ll say. The Houses mean nothing. We’ll love you no matter what.)