1. lead me to some new ambush, to some fresh mistake
At last the life support dies, emptying out with a last shuddering exhalation of moist air. With no pressure behind it, it simply fans out through the pipes and filters. Into the arctic-cold living quarters of the migrator Endeavour where it condenses immediately. Vapour into rain, and rain into ice. Ice and rain hang suspended for a moment, almost like they had been bespelled.
And it is beautiful, a ceiling of stars, Alasdair thinks numbly before they fall – gently. Gravity not being like it was only a couple of hours ago.
Nothing to do except wait. He can grip his wand and shout Reparo until his face turns blue(r) and receive only deadened looks of incomprehension.
He sighs, past resignation. This is not how he planned to go. He looks at the painting on his cabin wall, his precious cargo, silent and motionless for these last nineteen years. The brown eyes of the woman in the painting convey no more a sense of disappointment than they do accusation, or despair.
It is as they have said. We are all Muggles, uprooted from the Earth.
It was the second youngest Gage boy, Alasdair. His great-grandfather used to hand in essays scrawled on the wing feathers of Scottish dovecotes to her Arithmancy class, she remembered. A quick fifteen year old with dark eyes and darker curls, no head at all for Potions but without peer in Transfiguration. The adventurous, farseeing type, Gages. Unlike most of the old families, every member had taken Muggle Studies decades before the subject was compulsory.
Even as a portrait, she heard things; she could hardly help it. Drought, famine and ecological collapse all cannot help but affect the wizarding world. The muggles apparently had come up with a plan. Salvation is opportunity in another's hands. So no, Hermione was not at all surprised to see who it was.
Her voice was like a recitation of demiurgic numeric pairs sounded off the panellings of a library.
"My answer is yes, Mr. Gage."
"Headmistress, you haven't even heard—"
"Should I need to hear something which I already know? You wish to lead a group and journey to the new system with the colonists, correct?" She fixed him with a crinkled but stern gaze. The Earth-bound nature of magic was a hypothesis wizards had been trying to effectively disprove for centuries.
"You want to test if magical theory as we know it will hold there. A noble ambition, especially since you personally will not live to reach this distant new earth. Which is why you need me to go with you."
"To teach the generation that arrives, yes," Alasdair said, relieved. "If common belief is accurate, a wizard is not a wizard when he is out in space. Everything that can't be learned from books would die with us." He smiled abruptly like one who had solved a difficult and complicated puzzle. "But you, Professor Granger. Well, you are not so fragile a container for knowledge."
Hermione nodded as if this confirmed everything she had thought. "Then we are of a mind, Mr. Gage."