We adore chaos because we love to produce order. - M. C. Escher
Her hands were numb from folding her arms so long, and they stung when Harry attempted to move her up to bed for the night, waking her up fully.
"C'mon, Hermione," Harry whispered, soft enough so the finally, finally, sleeping wizard on the bed nearby wouldn't be disturbed. "Let's get you to bed."
"I can't leave him alone," she argued.
Harry's eyes caught the light of a car passing in the street outside of Kingsley's flat, tucked away in a neighborhood not far from where the Muggle Prime Minister lived. For a moment he blinked and readjusted to the darkness, but kept gently tugging at Hermione's arms.
"I won't." His voice was low and soothing against her nerves, the same effect as petting a kneazle the right way after someone pushed against the grain of the fur. The static electricity building in her hair dissipated some. "Let me do this."
As she unfolded herself from the chair, she brushed her hand along Harry's jaw to check on the state of his healing bruise. Sirius hadn't calmed down until they'd almost been forced to sedate him with a Stupefy or a Calming Draught, and several of the Auror's responding to the scene in the Department of Mysteries caught the wrong side of his fists. Harry smiled against her inspection. His hand lifted to cover hers and bring it over his chest to rest against his heart. His heartbeat was much slower than it had been several hours ago, the shock of seeing his godfather railing against the efforts of so many Ministrial employees finally dissipating, where his eyes still frequently darted over to the bed to make sure he was still there, but Harry wasn't tearing his hair out anymore.
Some things never changed, and the emotional resilience of Harry Potter was one of them.
"You tell me as soon as he wakes up, or anything happens," she said, her voice barely loud enough for Harry to hear. "I'll just be downstairs."
"You'd better actually sleep, Hermione."
"Take your own advice," she replied, her voice lacking any sort of venom as she slipped out of the room. Before the oak met the door frame, she glanced back to see Harry pulling the armchair a few inches closer to his sleeping godfather, a myriad of emotions running rampant across his face.
The solid sound of porcelain against a soapstone tabletop in the basement of Grimmauld Place rang around the lab, rising above the soft bubbling of two cauldrons and a beaker with a Bunsen burner beneath it.
Teddy Lupin looked up from where he was furiously taking notes, his hair a darker blue than normal as he concentrated on his task. His mug of tea rattled against the table again after he set it down, another healthy gulp rushing down his throat to his empty stomach. He stood after he'd completely drained his tea and turned to his lab partner.
"I've finished, so I'm going up to check on Da. Do you need anything, Hermione?"
Hermione didn't stop stirring the potion she was brewing with her apprentice, but she did lift her face to watch him start striding up the stairs. "Set the translations here, please. And no, I'm set, thanks. This will need my attention for at least another hour."
"I'll be down with lunch in forty five, then."
As his long legs carried him out of her sight before she could protest, Hermione lifted the notes he'd left her up with her right hand while her left kept time for another two minutes. She silently praised Andromeda, and not for the first time, for making Teddy sit penmanship courses after his first year; each letter and number stood crisp and clear against the page, and the book she had him translating from Old Norse to Modern Runes was heinously difficult as each rune had at least two meanings. Teddy's interpretation was nothing short of inspired.
The stirring rod made a clear note ring through the room as she drew it from the cauldron carefully and set it in the sink, the notes still up to her face as she read the theories and codes of what was the makings of Teddy's Mastery submission. She absently scratched at the tattoo on her inner arm inked after she'd earned her Mastery in Ancient Runes fifteen years before, and wondered if Teddy would get a similar one. Traditionally the Masters of Ancient Runes would choose a phrase in whatever old language they'd spent their training focusing on, but Hermione had a suspicion he'd get one to represent his father and the other Marauders.
As if on cue to her thoughts, she heard the soft padding of feet down the stairs, and her ears perked up to listen to whose they were, recognizing them more on instinct than sound. Two slippered feet descended from the first floor, connected to a man who looked exhausted out of his mind, having been up most of the previous night from the full moon.
"Remus," she greeted warmly. "Teddy said he was going up to check on you."
Settling himself into another chair near Hermione, Remus lifted his feet with some effort to rest on the ottoman between them. "He did, but he wouldn't believe me when I insisted that I'm fine."
One leg unfolded from her perch on a plush armchair in the corner of the lab, and Hermione used it to gently nudge one of the crossed feet near her. Remus chuckled at the way she regarded him: if she were wearing glasses, she'd be peering over them in a manner uncannily similar to Albus Dumbledore.
Throwing his hands up, the sleeves of his too-large robe falling down to his elbows, the werewolf said, "I concede, I concede. I'm sore as shit but I don't want my son to worry about me when he's got his Mastery next month."
"He made sure his exam is a full week after the moon, and though he's nervous as hell, he'll do wonderfully. He doesn't agree with me when I tell him he's brilliant...like father, like son."
Remus grinned despite himself, pushing back against her foot a bit in retaliation, unable to form a viable argument to her point, the decades-old debate over Remus's self-deprecation ringing in their memories.
Silence followed as Remus leaned his head back against the chair to relax while he hid away from his worried son. Hermione's rustling papers were the only sound until her wand buzzed to alert the potion was nearly ready.
"Do you need Teddy?" Remus asked without opening his eyes.
"No, this is purely potions, and he's already mastered the Wolfsbane prep. I need him to focus on Ancient Runes for the next month as much as he can. You should go up and have lunch with him. Is Dora coming home on lunch today?"
"I'm not sure," Remus replied. He swallowed thickly against a dry throat, the sound loud enough for even an average ear to pick up above the sound of Hermione adding more ingredients to her experiment. Hermione absentmindedly waved her unoccupied hand to send a mug of tea towards him, which he collected out of the air before it landed on his head. "Thank you. Harry mentioned something about a half day today."
The calendar inside of her head flipped until she realized what day it was. She'd memorized every full moon from sixth year until 2065, but the dates still blurred themselves sometimes. When it landed on October 25th, 2018 she hummed in understanding as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. "Today is-"
"October 25th."
The new voice filled the room the way only his could.
Without his shoulder-length hair partially concealing them, Sirius's bright silver eyes regarded the two of them with open curiosity. The patterns cut into one side of his head curled around his ear and into his part, where the other half flipped up in a messy pompadour. His hands were resting in the pockets of his dressing gown loosely belted over what appeared to be only a pair of boxer shorts, the tattoos on his chest and a few on his legs in full view. Compared to Remus, who'd battled through another transformation and sleepless night, Sirius looked as energized as a teenage boy on his way to the Quidditch World Cup.
He'd not aged a day within the Veil, but the years in Azkaban still showed in the length of the lines around his mouth beneath trimmed facial hair. As much as the house they stood in had changed since his death and resurrection, he still appeared to age another ten years while within its walls, and only came here during full moons to spend them as Padfoot with Moony. And, though she were loathe to admit it, in the months after his return, Hermione had holed up in the home's basement more often than she had even when she'd been using its expansive lab for her Potions Mastery in order to avoid him.
Nearly a full year separated the moment he'd been extracted from a blood-red Veil by a would-be Dark wizard, and Hermione still had a difficult time remembering this Sirius was closer to her age than Remus's. She turned back to stirring the cauldron in front of her, watching the pieces of mint and wormwood melt into the acidic brew evenly with her careful attention, and willed away the urge to continue tracing the runes along Sirius's collarbones. The little hairs at the back of her neck alerted her baser senses that he wasn't restraining himself from looking at her while he walked to take the seat she'd vacated.
"You're infuriatingly awake, Padfoot," Remus said. She could hear rustling behind her as she assumed Remus sat up and Sirius adjusted his robe, from the way the scent of the two of them washed over to her.
"I've always been this way after a moon run."
"Let me rephrase - you're constantly infuriating, Padfoot."
"Play nicely," Hermione said, turning over her shoulder with a look of warning before the two men could escalate into a verbal slap fight, "or get out of my lab."
"Yeah, Moony, play nicely. I'm only freshly bloomed from the Veil, after all, and quite fragile."
Hermione's stomach dropped to her knees as memories of the battle in the Department of Mysteries filled her mind. On autopilot, she didn't notice her palm crushing the dried mint leaves into a fine powder, fingers moving in time with her gritting teeth, the smells and sounds of the lab falling away, replaced with the acrid scent of Dark Soul magic and charred flesh...
A near inhuman growl rumbled in Remus's chest, covering his snickers of laughter. "You are so full of shit."
Teddy chose that moment to bound down the stairs, Harry and Dora behind them, and Hermione's senses were so focused on who was already in the room that she nearly destroyed a week's worth of work, stopping herself from dropping in more mint leaves just in time.
"Are you packed, then?" Remus asked his friend, his voice a bit gruff as he stood from the low armchair.
Hermione heard Sirius hum in confirmation. "Yeah. The kid and I are leaving in the morning."
"You can hardly call him the kid anymore, Pads. He's as old as you are now."
"Poppycock, he could be ten years older than me and I'd still call him kid."
As the two men went back up the stairs, Hermione breathed in deeply, realizing she was holding her breath as she lowered the heat on her potion and removed it from above the burner, but her lungs still filled with a scent that had plagued her for months.
