Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
***
From the journal of Hermione Granger
(undated – early October 1998)
There's a peculiar tension to waiting for a fight, when you know that you're going to have the fight and the other person does not.
Neville does not know that I mean to have a row with him about Malfoy, and the study group, and the whole question of his intentions toward me—Neville's, that is, not Malfoy's. Malfoy's intentions are simple, it appears: to be inconspicuous, to study for his NEWTs, and to annoy me from time to time for amusement.
So, paradoxically, I look at Neville and feel a tenderness for him in his ignorance of the storm that is going to break over his head once I have cleared space in my calendar to have a proper argument with him. It's actually rather embarrassing, for once or twice he has caught me looking at his face, tracing its lines as he reads or eats breakfast in the Great Hall. The tension of a row anticipated is very like love, like the giddiness in your chest at the thought of declaring yourself to the one you adore, or at least inviting him to stroll with you in Hogsmeade.
It's all so Victorian, I realize: asking someone his intentions, counting up marriageable prospects, even this whole system of debts of honor. No, the debts of honor feel archaic: as if we were medieval Icelanders reciting the sagas by a winter's fire while sharpening the axes with which we will do battle in the spring, having nourished our grudges in the sub-arctic dark.
So I'm reminded, as the roster turned up this week with a defacement. I had been quite pleased with myself for the clever bit of spellwork that will cascade changes on one copy to all the copies—until I looked at the roster this morning and saw that the designation 'Hogwarts' above Malfoy's name had been lined through and 'Azkaban' written there.
It felt like a punch in the stomach, and it's not even me.
Ron did it, of course, speaking of ancient blood feuds. Harry really doesn't give a rip, as far as I can tell. The morning after the battle, he returned Malfoy's wand to him, getting a sneer in return. But then to be fair, Harry arrived to do this grand act of chivalry just as the Aurors were preparing to take Lucius and Narcissa away to intern them in Azkaban. Lucius was embracing his son for what was probably the last time (and may in fact have been the first time as well), and it was more than clear that Draco was both moved by this attention from his father and mortified that Harry had witnessed it.
(Interesting, how I always call Malfoy by his surname when I speak to him, but when I think about him, half the time I'm thinking of him by his given name, although we've never been friends and probably never will be.)
Oh yes, and let's not forget the Daily Prophet photographers, who have been Harry's nearly constant shadows ever since the end of the war. (I almost wrote, "since we won the war," but that's rather too optimistic.) What was life like before, when we didn't have to dodge the tabloid press of the wizarding world?
In any case, it's completely out of bounds for Ron to jeer at him about Azkaban. There is nothing funny about the tower in the North Sea; I certainly remember Sirius Black's remarks on that subject—more, I remember the dead expression on that ravaged face when the subject came up.
Why I'd thought that was a clever bit of spellwork, I'm not sure. I'd been thinking about the possibilities for communication, not how best to facilitate an exchange of insults between Ron and Draco. Now I'm fully expecting to come home from work and find Ron's name lined through and replaced with 'Weasel,' and 'the Burrow' with 'pigsty' or 'bin'. It's so predictable it just makes me grind my teeth.
So that's another piece of trouble, thanks to Neville Longbottom and his chivalry.
***
It feels quite strange now, studying for the NEWTs. So much that I've learned in the last two years is not in there. We will not be asked about the Horcrux, though there was little I've contemplated more; nor will we be asked to do a Protean Charm nor a shrinking charm, though sub rosa, with an expression of great amusement, Minerva McGonagall gave me to understand that my packing charms for the Great Horcrux Hunt have set off a major fashion revolution. In particular, young Pureblood witches are competing to make the tiniest, daintiest, most capacious charmed reticules, with my blue beaded bag as the unspoken standard.
To understate the case, I'm no longer a student. Yes, I am studying ordinary magic with the purpose of passing exams, but I just pulled off something that killed the last two witches who tried it, both of whom were Pureblood elders at the peak of their powers. (Messalina Malfoy was over eighty, and her cousin Amanita Rosier was of similar years.)
Derwent told me in no uncertain terms that my weather-working was classic Dark magic: I was standing on very magical ground at the Burrow, and channeling the earth magic using my body as the wand. Not a bright idea, especially not solo. I was just lucky that there were two people there who knew how to reverse it—because it took both of them to stabilize the situation.
And what else she said, with a look of warning: that I might find myself getting offers that might not otherwise have come my way.
I wasn't quite sure what she meant, or rather I didn't want to admit that I suspected.
She clarified: it wasn't likely that any of them would actually know what had happened, because the Ministry certainly wasn't going to noise it about, but they would sense it; Purebloods were like that, and I should be prepared for things to be quite different.
I narrowed my eyes and said, "What do you mean, Purebloods are like that? Aren't you a Pureblood?"
She looked at me as if I were just now getting the point. I was shocked. I thought it might be taken as rude (and in fact I half meant it so after fifteen minutes of mystification and nonsense), because I personally think blood status is pernicious nonsense and to inquire after it nothing short of indecent.
Once more, I'd guessed wrong.
And then I bethought myself of the thing for which Pureblood witch is a shorthand: before me stood a woman whose family had lived on the other side of the wall of the Leaky Cauldron for three hundred years. What had they missed? A good piece of the Renaissance, the scientific revolution—in fact, it occurred to me in a flash that the scientific revolution might not have happened without the Statute of Secrecy keeping all that noise out of the data—the industrialization of England and the Continent, two world wars.
She sounds not too different from anyone I'd meet on the outside—in the real world, in my parents' world, visiting their surgery—but she heals with magic, and no doubt some number of Derwents were caught up in the witch hunts. Nearly every wizarding family, I am learning, has some atrocity story that they cherish like a talisman. That's why we built the wall. That's why we closed the doors on them and decided to live among ourselves alone. As if to convince themselves that this was the right and natural thing, to live apart from one's kind.
Because what else had they been asking me to do? And what else had I done, year after year, but to grow more distant from my parents? Some of that was the war, and before that the excitement of finding my own, but now I was thinking about getting off the plane in Australia and seeking them out, and what I would find… what would confront me now, after almost two years away. The trials don't start until the ides of March, and won't conclude until May Day at least. If I know the Ministry, it will be midsummer before anything happens on the official front, and of course there are the foreign Ministries to consider.
I sighed. Meanwhile, I supposed that Derwent was telling me I might have some trouble from witches or wizards who fancied me for my post-traumatic stress. Because that's all this was, the presentation of PTSD in wizarding folk. Not enough of us with my clinical profile to run a decent randomized trial…
"That's correct, in essence," she said. And my discipline was going to be to exercise constant vigilance, per usual, to be sure that I didn't permit any of that to flow through me again: neither earth nor sky, because those were forces with which one trifled at one's peril. It was neither the Ministry nor the Muggles that I need fear, but the recoil from what I might call up. There was a reason that they called it Dark magic: as in darkness and chaos over the waters, the unbroken night before creation.
As it was, the Muggles were going to be talking about the last one for days. There are Muggles in Ottery St. Catchpole, and some number of them might have been up early to see that vortex turning over the village. On the other thing, there have been any number of odd things over the last two years, and unusual weather is the very least of it; at least a wall cloud is a natural phenomenon, unlike the Dark Mark, say.
And being English, I suppose that the Muggles had gotten used to it with the usual shrug of resignation; that certainly had happened on the wizarding side of the border.
Giants stomping through the countryside: that's just going to increase our commute time. Bother.
Werewolves roaming in packs: no more romantic moonlight strolls, but young folk can get acquainted while patrolling the perimeter of a full moon night. There's nothing like a spot of adrenalin to get other hormones flowing as well.
Soul-destroying monsters or wraiths turning up in packs in broad daylight: I suppose that will keep those bothersome children in the Defense Association busy teaching the Patronus Charm. Better that than to have them plotting revolution…
I startled, realizing that likely was the reason we were all being drafted into the civil defense. Otherwise, we might well be thinking how to bring down the Ministry, though frankly I didn't see Harry as the wizarding world's answer to Lenin or Che Guevara. Because it really was Harry they were concerned to buy off or neutralize.
And I wasn't going to be able to have that row with Neville yet because we were teaching the Patronus Charm to the Hogsmeade villagers and the Hogwarts student body—if you could so designate the ragtag assembly of war orphans and children whose parents were leaving them at the school because it wasn't safe to come home yet. Some of the kids that Neville is teaching in the greenhouses are too young for their Hogwarts letter, nine- and ten-year-olds; the ones younger than that are being fostered in wizarding families.
***
The first civilian Patronus training for Hogsmeade and environs is held in the Great Hall at Hogwarts in the first weeks of October. Hermione and Neville find themselves teaching a group composed of villagers from Hogsmeade as well as the war orphans and some of the refugees staying at Hogwarts. What's disconcerting is not so much that they're teaching, but that some of their students are decades older than they are.
Not half an hour into the lesson, Hermione realizes that Neville is by far her superior as a teacher. The Patronus Charm had actually come quite easily to her, and it's very hard for her to explain the visualization.
She doesn't learn so much as overhear.
"You have to think of your happiest memory." Neville is sitting on the floor with three of his greenhouse children around him, all in duelist's stance with their wands ready.
The little girl with the reddish hair and the sea-green eyes extends her wand. "Expecto patronum!" She looks at Neville critically. "But nothing happens when I think about it." Her face crumples a little. "I don't have a happiest memory. They all got ruined."
He says that happiness can visit you at the oddest times, even when things are midnight black. It's a matter of a scent, wind on the face, a taste lingering on the tongue. Neville confesses that his happiest memory has to do with walking outside the greenhouses on a winter day in his third year at Hogwarts. At the time, he thought he was utterly miserable, but there was the watery sunshine on new-fallen snow, and the lush green on the other side of the glass, and the icicles sparkling on the Gothic peaks of the castle, and a scent of pine on the wind from the Forbidden Forest.
He's not sure why it's his happiest memory, but it is.
She frowns, and then there's a look of half-understanding.
He says, "If it helps, close your eyes." She does so. "Now imagine you're really there. We'll try different senses. Start by looking. Do you have a picture?" She nods. "Now open your eyes, and try to stay with that picture." She does the incantation again, with no result.
"Close your eyes again. Are you back there now? This time listen to what's happening there…"
It's touch in her case. "The feel of the rose petals," she says. She opens her eyes, and says "Expecto Patronum!" and the silvery cloud focuses into a fat little pony with a shaggy mane.
***
By the end of the day, Hermione is doing the same exercise with her students, to great success. Nearly two-thirds of the group is able to cast a stable Patronus, a remarkable success rate. The rest will return for a follow-up tutorial in a week.
Neville sends them home with an exercise to try different memories, and all five senses with each. "Sometimes the memory you think will work isn't the right one for the charm. The memory has to bring up strong feeling. It's not just what you think ought to be a happy memory."
He tells them to practice and not be discouraged. To her surprise, he tells the story of the Dementor incident in Hogsmeade and how neither he nor the Aurors present were able to produce a stable Patronus, but his friend did it, and that was enough to save them all. (He nods toward Hermione.) You never know if you're going to be the necessary one, so you have to practice, even if you don't think you're particularly good at it.
After the students have filed out of the hall, she turns to Neville and says, "You were absolutely brilliant." He shakes his head.
"I learned it all the hard way," he said. "I'm not clever like you."
"You're a real teacher," she says. "I think Professor Sprout knew what she was doing when she asked you to be her apprentice."
He looks down, and she thinks, he still doesn't know he's good at this. She continues, "The way you broke it down by senses—that's just how I got the Patronus when we were facing the Dementors. It didn't work the first time. Only I wouldn't have been able to explain it the way you did. And what you said at the end was absolutely the right thing. They all remember what you did in the battle, and you hadn't thought you were the necessary one, had you?"
He looks up and meets her eyes. In the slanting sunlight his eyes are not brown, as she's always thought they were, but green and gold. There ought to be nothing particularly handsome about his face, with its round cheeks and snub nose. She could subtract points for that, and for the livid scars across his cheekbones that stand white against the sunburn on the undamaged skin, as if it were not only scar but bone that stared at her. She could feel a certain condescension at the way his mouth involuntarily curls into a smile as he looks at her… except that his face is full of light when he does that, illumination quite different from the sunlight that is striking bronze and gold from his ordinary brown hair.
In the back of her mind, there's still a ghostly afterimage of Ron's bright blue eyes, flaming hair and fair freckled skin (cream sprinkled with nutmeg, she thought one bright winter afternoon). She thinks that even as a very old woman, her heart will always skip a beat when she sees a tall man with red hair. She could always pick Ron out in a crowd…
What—who—stands before her is quite ordinary by contrast, the grown-up version of the chubby, tearful little boy she met on the train. Not a little boy any more, she thinks, as she feels a sudden flare of attraction. If she dared, she'd kiss him right now, except that feels like too big a step. This is Neville, after all. She's known him since they were both eleven, and they've been friends all that time. She's suddenly very much afraid of getting it wrong.
And there's the matter of not being on the list, and the fight they haven't had yet…
A woman's voice at the far end of the hall calls tentatively, "Hermione? Neville?"
She looks up, and startles before she reminds herself, Andromeda, not Bellatrix. "Oh, hello! I didn't know you were coming up to Hogwarts." Andromeda closes the distance between them remarkably quickly; Hermione forgets how tall and long-legged she actually is.
"I didn't know myself that I'd be here, until the Headmistress returned my Owl this morning. She's been very helpful." She presses Hermione's hand. "Thank you so much for the suggestion."
"Were you able to meet with your nephew?"
"Yes. He wasn't very forthcoming about the difficulties he's having, but the Headmistress filled me in." She frowns. "I'm not sure how much to tell Narcissa. She'll only worry. On the other hand, she already suspects something is amiss."
"How did he behave otherwise?"
"He was surprisingly polite, considering all I've heard of him." She laughs ruefully. "Quite a bit better behaved than the last time I saw him, for certain. And rather taller."
They walk out to the entrance hall. Andromeda is going back to the Burrow after stopping in Hogsmeade for some shopping.
Hermione looks sidelong at Neville as they walk back to the apprentices' corridor. She's biting her lower lip, thinking about how she might make some sort of gesture that says "I'm attracted to you," without being quite so—well, blunt. Explicit. To be honest, she'd prefer something she could take back if it turns out the feeling isn't reciprocated. She's never been good at this. If it took six years with Ron, how long is it going to take with Neville, assuming he's even interested?
Plainly it isn't meant to happen, at least not that day, because just as she's worked up courage to say something to Neville, they meet Professor Slughorn, who wants to talk with them about hours for NEWTs preparation in the Potions classroom. Hermione stops in to her room to pick up the revision timetables and they proceed downstairs to the Potions classroom. He wants to see the list of students who are likely to be stopping in. "These are just the people in our group," Hermione says. "There might be others as well."
Slughorn nods over the list. "Potter, Weasley, hmm, Lovegood, Granger, Longbottom." He pauses. "Malfoy?" He looks at Hermione. "My dear girl, he's banned from the Potions classroom, owing to the regrettable events of your sixth year."
Well, at least Slughorn is on my side. But then he spoils it, fawning over her about how talented and heroic she is, how she might even give Lily Evans a run for her money. Hermione thinks that it's only a matter of time before he spells it out in skywriting for all of wizarding Britain to read, that Hermione Granger is a credit to her race and proof of what a proper Hogwarts education can do to refine the raw talent of the crudest of Muggle-borns.
Neville says, "But the Potions NEWT is mostly practical." He looks at her before continuing. "And we were rather counting on having him in our study group."
Slughorn says, "I won't have him in there unsupervised." From the tone, she gathers that Malfoy is in serious disfavor with Slughorn, not least for the purloined Polyjuice, though she suspects as well for the damage he did to the reputation of Slytherin House.
Neville is undeterred. "He's at Hogwarts under guard. Would it be satisfactory to have an Auror in the classroom with us if he's there?"
Slughorn looks at Neville and proceeds to explain to him, very man-to-man, that the Malfoys are a bad lot, even worse than you might think. Confidentially, in the tone of a mentor sharing a secret with a favored protégé, he explains that it's not widely known that Abraxas Malfoy did not die of dragon pox, but of a Potion that mimicked its effects. He can say that with confidence, because it was one of his students, the all too talented Severus Snape, who developed that particular draught.
Since when has Slughorn been trying to curry favor with Neville the Potions duffer?
Well, Neville wasn't a duffer in Slughorn's class… but "since when" is easy; it's since the Battle of Hogwarts, since the slaying of Nagini, since Neville Longbottom became collectible enough to qualify for the Slug Club.
"I'm interested in fair play, Professor," Hermione cuts in, with her best attempt at a winning smile, "and I know you are as well." She isn't sure if she's more annoyed at Neville and his ridiculous chivalry to the defeated, or Slughorn's unctuous attention to the newly famous. The business of that evil Potions text and Harry's cheating still rankles. (How much trouble could have been averted in the post-war if Harry had just thrown up a shield charm rather than having a go at Draco with Sectumsempra?)
No, Slughorn annoys her more than Neville does; he's the voice of the Pureblood establishment, the liberal assimilationist wing, and that's what decides it for her. And anyway, this is the role she's really good at, the Voice of Reason. Slughorn has to answer to the Headmistress, whether he likes it or not, though of course she doesn't say it quite that crudely. There is the matter of fair access for all students, and of course there's this tricky matter of Draco's status, but after all the Headmistress has made it quite clear to her and Neville, anyway, that it's to be as little like formal internment as possible, because after all there hasn't been a trial, and unless they've ceased living in England, Draco Malfoy is still innocent until proven guilty even if his grandfather was poisoned by his father. Or Severus Snape. Which she doesn't go so far as to say is beside the point, even if it is, because Slughorn does love a good gossip.
And then there's the business of signed photographs for the wall of fame, which she's shocked to hear Neville suggest. Bribery has never been his style.
As they leave the Potions classroom, she thinks she might have heard Slughorn muttering about how they most definitely do Sort too soon.
***
Inevitably, it does come to the conversation about the roster that she was hoping not to have, only it's not with Ron.
Draco is shoving the NEWTs roster under her nose and pointing at the legend "Azkaban" over his name. "So Weasley did this."
She nods, and then says, "He won't let go of it, but do try to pretend the war is over." Of course, that's asking too much from either of them, but particularly from Draco.
"As if I could miss that, given that I lost," he retorts. "And Weasley's going to rub my face in it."
She supposes she's going to have to spell it out. "Do you know why he hates you?"
"Oh, no, Granger, I haven't a clue. Do enlighten me." No, she's going to have to deal with his sarcasm on top of everything else. Better to pretend that she didn't hear it.
"There's your constant jeering about his family having no money, the jibes about Quidditch, et weary cetera. Making fun of his mother, which I notice you don't tolerate in the case of your own. But what really does it is what your family did to his sister. That he doesn't forgive, ever."
"What are you talking about?"
"You had the Dark Lord as a house guest, and that wasn't very pleasant, was it?" She's gratified to see him flinch, even though she has used the expected honorific. "Now imagine him taking up residence in your head." She isn't sure an appeal to empathy is the right tack, given to whom she's talking, but she doesn't have the energy to think up a more creative approach.
He opens his mouth and then closes it.
She adds, "For most of a year. Thanks to your dear father."
"So I'm not supposed to say anything back… to that." He points to the defaced roster.
"You can if you like, but it wouldn't be wise. It's not only Ginny, you know. There's his brother Bill, whom Greyback savaged, and Fred—gone thanks to Bellatrix. I wouldn't provoke Ron Weasley just now, if I were you." Perhaps the appeal to power politics will work better. Of course, it would be easiest of all if she didn't have to pretend to be the wise, mature, parental one.
She gives him what's meant to be a significant look, and he stares back at her, chin lifted in the characteristic Malfoy attitude. She shrugs; it's simply not worth the effort. "Don't worry, I won't say another word about it. I am not Ron's mother, or yours. I don't have time to waste restraining you idiots from killing each other. Do as you like, and on your head be it."
Maybe Draco will shoot off his mouth, and Ron will hex him to the hospital wing, and then she won't have to deal with him in the study group at all. Really, it isn't her problem.
With that, she turns to Neville to talk about scheduling the Potions classroom, and ignores him entirely. Best not to give the volatile ingredient any sense it could blow the whole thing sky-high; that will only encourage it. The old antagonists will be meeting in this room after all, Harry and Ron and Luna all coming from the Burrow; Dean has decisively turned down the option of doing the NEWTs, at least at this juncture. He's putting all his effort into his art school portfolio and his work for the civil defense.
The last note she had from Harry had a shamefaced tone to it; he apologized for them drifting apart and proposed a night out at the Three Broomsticks. It's a step in the right direction, though there's still no indication if he's talked to Ginny about her jealousy, not to mention the other things. If it were her, she'd be dragging Ginny over to St. Mungo's, even if it took a full Body-Bind to do it.
But that's another story.
***
Author's note: Neville's sensory approach to the Patronus Charm is based on the exercises of the 'Method' pioneered by Stanislavsky. See Uta Hagen. A Challenge for the Actor. The exercises therein are also quite helpful to writers of fiction.
The fate of Abraxas Malfoy: Slughorn's brush-off of Draco's attempt at flattery, in Half-blood Prince, has always struck me oddly. Draco's grandfather was not an old man by wizarding standards, so my personal suspicion is foul play. (JOdell suggests that Abraxas may have been keeping Lucius on a short leash after his all-too-well-publicized Death Eater scrapes in the late 1970s.) And what better candidate for the role of consulting poisoner than the talented Professor Snape?