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).
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From the journal of Hermione Granger
20 December 1998
A mere five days from Christmas, and the afternoon is half twilight, some days a pinkish haze through blue-shadowed snow, other days silent snowfall. The days draw in and the castle is dark, darker than it ever seemed to me even all those years when I would beg permission from my parents to be there over the Christmas holidays for the unraveling of one mystery or another. It was all a grand adventure in those days: what child doesn't want to be at the heart of such a story? Especially not a child raised on detective novels and tales of artful hacking, who wasn't sure if she wanted to be Sherlock Holmes or Albert Einstein when she grew up.
Instead, I grew up to be a witch, and a magical weapons specialist, and if I'd ever thought about it, well, I hadn't, but now I am re-reading Machiavelli and having a go at Clausewitz. Friction, indeed: it's friction, all of the parts going ever so slightly wrong, that is the chief drag on human undertakings. The grand plan never goes quite so grandly in life as it does on paper, no matter how well it's thought out: Gallipoli was a spectacular failure, Normandy a somewhat less messy version (in history's view, a success, but woe betide you if you were one of the particles caught between the gears).
Well, I never thought I'd be staring at the same prospects as Winston Churchill: the likelihood of having my name on a spectacular, blood-drenched failure. It was she, Hermione Granger the Mudblood, who led the ill-fated attempt to Banish the Dementors, and took with her into the Void half of wizarding Britain… it was she, who did more harm than Tom Riddle the self-styled Lord Voldemort...
All right. I've read enough history books. I know how they talk about the losers. If Churchill had died before 1939, they would know him only as the architect of a failed amphibian landing, a bloodbath rather than the imperfect prototype of a later victory.
I mean to survive this.
I mean for all of us to survive this. Yes, I signed on to this in a moment of self-reproach, when I thought I had lost everything, when I thought that I had resigned forever all chance that Neville would want to do with me… given that he'd had to do with the other one, and now…
Well, there are things I still haven't told Neville, that the other one will not tell because I have not lifted the compulsion. The last time I saw Draco at Longbottom House, I offered to release him, but he shook his head no. "After the trials," he said. "Maybe."
I said, "Derwent knew that you were under Fidelius. Someone else will know as well."
"And why shouldn't I be?" There's something almost attractive when he lifts his chin like that and stares defiance. "Not everyone in Britain needs to know what I like in bed." He smirked at me when he said that. "I was pleased to learn that there were spells even swotty Granger didn't know."
"Well, yes," I said, "but they're of specialist interest…" That variant of Incarcerus, for example, whose purpose is to create bonds that can be pulled against without damage to wrists or ankles… From an engineering point of view, those bonds have very interesting shock-absorption properties.
He stared at me. "You're talking Mugglish again," he said.
Not an aphrodisiac, I would assume. Well, at least not when the direction he wants to take the conversation is, "Would you care to tie me up and bugger me?" and mine is, "How fascinating: a perfect shipping material, and quite environmentally sound: one can Vanish it when it's done its duty…"
No, the kinky aristocrat and the magical hacker do not a workable couple make, unless one is interested in comedy.
On a serious note, there are the things I haven't told… no, that was where I began, wasn't it? The things I haven't told Neville.
And now someone is knocking on the door. Yes, it's Neville, so I must go.
ooo
It's an hour or so until supper when Hermione opens the door of her little ship's cabin of a room, to Neville. He's dressed in heavy cloak and traditional robes over his Muggle winter things. An odd combination, indeed. He means a walk in the outdoors, along the lake.
The price to pay for discretion is winter cold. Well, that is what warming charms are for, and the advantage of course is that they are grownups now, persons of importance, with some of the privileges of teachers. Their chilly walk will take them out of earshot of the pupils, or the orphans…
…which is part of Neville's intent. He's been talking to his Gran, and there is news to impart: that she's been talking to Kingsley about the question of the Hogwarts orphans, and the untenable position in which they all find themselves, given the state of things and the inadequate legal system. They no longer can afford punitive measures that would shut away part of a generation. They cannot afford to lose any more generations.
It's only what he's been saying all along, with his actions at least.
And it's time that they faced the inevitable: that they will have to ask for help from across the border.
Kingsley is only somewhat amenable; he's caught between two fires. It isn't until two or three sentences in that she realizes that her schoolmate is referring to the Minister for Magic by his first name, and no doubt because he's quoting Gran, to whom Kingsley is a very much younger contemporary. Very much younger, as in young enough to be her grandchild.
Neville sighs, and pulls his cloak about him in the sharp blue twilight, and says that it will not be easy. Is not easy.
She touches his elbow, and he looks at her very sadly, and then offers her his arm. It isn't what she meant, of course, and she realizes how many of Neville's gestures belong to another generation.
He says, "And I can't remember in all this… did we invite you for Boxing Day?" She can't remember either; holiday invitations belong to another world, in which she is not wondering about the wizarding equivalent of Mein Kampf, or Gone with the Wind, whichever it is that the Umbridge opus is, because it seems to partake of both. There are no easy paths in the postwar.
"I don't remember," she said. "I don't have an invitation for Boxing Day. Though Percy told me… there might be one for Christmas." Neville nods.
"So Harry's on the job, then."
"Well, Percy certainly is." She sighs.
"I've heard people saying you ought to marry Percy."
"Well, your Gran said something of the sort… well, that he was a prospect." She says, "It wouldn't be a good idea. We'd only encourage each other…. in our madness." Neville nods. "And in any case, you needn't worry. He's in love with someone else. Quite smitten, though I gather she's turned him down."
Neville smiles, a slight sad expression.
ooo
They walk into the snowy night, always keeping the dark lake within view, and she realizes that it's the same route that she walked with Harry a few weeks back… or was that months? She can't remember properly. Yes, that was before the whole business with the photo in the Prophet, and the attack, and so much else.
She's exhausted, and it must show, because Neville stops to ask if she is quite all right. He stops, and she with him, because they are walking arm in arm, which is quite old-fashioned; she'd be self-conscious if they were on the street in London, but this is in another place, and time.
Neville was raised by someone who got her Hogwarts letter in the reign of King Edward VII, so some of his social graces are of very antique form; in her turn, Augusta Longbottom would have had some teachers at Hogwarts who had been young at the time of the French Revolution.
It still amazes her that she belongs to that world, that she herself might some day be looking back over a century or more. From the Olympian heights of one's second century (in good health, she reminds herself) it would all look quite different.
He says, "I remember this walk. In the summer. We talked about Azkaban then."
She doesn't remember precisely, only that there had been a succession of conversations, that had led to that first fire-lit interview with Augusta, as Neville looked at her. Oh yes, that mad flight with Gran, and the look in his eye when she came back indoors with her hair in disorder and the sparks of magic flying off her…
… a succession of interviews with Gran, it had been, and it's not only the progression of the year that made each one more chilling, but the successive revelations of just how bad things are.
He says, "You know, I wondered at what you said, and I did think about it. There's so much we don't discuss among ourselves, you know, because it all seems self-evident. Of course we need Azkaban, because otherwise what would we do about Dark witches and wizards? Except it really doesn't solve anything, not any of the real problems. Not the children."
"I'm surprised that you said that you'd go on hunger strike in front of the Wizengamot," she says. "It seems…"
"Not something that a pureblood wizard would do?"
She nods. "That's some of it."
He says with particular emphasis, "But it might be necessary. We've devoured our own for too long. We can't afford it any more. And it does make a difference seeing it up close… and not being able to stop it." He says, "I thought that working in the greenhouse would help them. It helped me. There are living things, and they need you to take care of them. You put aside … the other things."
She realizes how many of the other things he hasn't spoken. She knows about the ones in which she intervened, the casual bullying by Malfoy and the practical jokes of the Weasley twins, but no doubt there was more.
"I would try not to think about home, about Andrew and Robbie and Gran and the caving club, because that was summer. I couldn't think about summer at Hogwarts. It was always winter here, you know, in every memory I have of the place…"
They're staring back at the castle now, as the wind rises, lifting arabesques of snow.
"You take care of the plants, and it's summer inside the greenhouses, and before long, it's summer outside too, and it's time to go home. Except that Wilhelmina and her friends don't get to go home. It's probably no good keeping them here, except where else are they going to go? If I'd had to live at Hogwarts year round when I was twelve …"
His voice trails off into silence. She can feel him very consciously not following that thought, for rather a long time.
ooo
She looks up at him; in the darkness and the dim glow from the snow he is frowning slightly. He says, "I've been thinking about the things you said. Including about the memory charms." She hears the pause. "I talked to Derwent, I mean…" He shuffles, and his hand finds hers, and his fingers press hers close against his arm. "As a matter of professional ethics, of course. Leaving aside that you're not bound by a Healer's oath, of course, and given the state of war…" His voice trails off, and then he starts again, "What I mean to say is, none of the choices were good ones. None of them. You were right to be angry with me. And Gran. It's true she would have given you the help if you'd asked. But of course you weren't going to ask."
She nods.
"Gran forgets sometimes that we're not grown up. Not the way that she is. That's the thing that Derwent says. 'You're a very young person in a very old world.'"
"She said the same to me, at the Halloween ball."
Neville smiles sadly. "That was the night it changed, wasn't it?"
Hermione frowns.
"Because I wasn't there, and Draco was." He shrugs. "Not that it matters. Not now." He says, "Gran assumed that you understood the debt owed, and that you would approach her."
"The debt?"
"For all the times you stood up for me. No one else did, you know. You were the only one. Well, and Professor Lupin. But it was the Defense Association, really, that made the difference, and it was you who organized that." He says, "I talked with her, you know, after you came to ask her about her intentions. I told her that she was right. I was an idiot to have brought up the whole question of the marriage candidates in the first place. But she was in the wrong, too: she'd neglected to tell you what she had in mind. I told her that you weren't likely to understand our ways, even though you're brilliant, because the important things aren't in books."
She says with some bitterness, "None of the important things are in books."
"That's not true. But the things everyone assumes… well, my mother was a Pureblood. So there was never a matter of explaining it to her, after all, when Gran came to interviewing a prospective daughter-in-law."
"Was your mother a prospective apprentice as well?"
Neville frowns. "No, I don't think so. She was already in Auror training when the betrothal contract was signed." He says, "Dean had a talk with me about the whole business, too. He still thinks of himself as a Muggle-born, you know. Because that's what he's been the whole time. He'd have died a Mudblood, if you hadn't shown up to Malfoy Manor."
She doesn't need to see his face to know the look on it as he adds, "He would have ended near his father, he said."
"I know. I took the news to his mother."
"Dean and Luna had a talk with me, about what I didn't understand. He's had a conversation or two with Lovegood senior, you know. Because there were questions as to why he was keeping company with Luna, and with what intentions." He adds, "Not that he was playing the paterfamilias, old Xeno, but he doesn't understand how the incomers think."
"So Luna's father asked Dean if his intentions were honorable?" She can't help the urge to giggle; it's so archaic, the whole thing.
"Well, he wasn't sure what Dean meant, because it didn't look like anything he recognized." He adds, "They finish each other's sentences, and they're inseparable. But he's not of our world, and he's not sitting the NEWTs."
Hermione says, "No."
"He has other plans. And apparently you had something to do with those." Hermione flinches; she hadn't expected that Dean would have been so indiscreet. "Seamus tried to talk him out of it, of course, now that he's a Half-blood, but he was having none of it."
"He's had some success with his work," Hermione says. "One of my workmates owns one of his prints."
"That would be 'Two Wizards Playing Chess,' wouldn't it." Hermione nods. "Percy knows about what you've been about, or guesses, I think. Not that he's going to turn you in. 'One less on my docket,' was what he said."
Hermione frowns. Neville adds, "I'm not going to ask how many people you've set up with forged credentials, but I gather that Percy and Gran have been speculating. The consensus is that Shacklebolt should have negotiated something with the Muggle Minister, so we wouldn't need a freelancer creating Muggle identities for our people. Gran has had words with Shacklebolt about the orphans, and Derwent has put in her oar, as well. She's been run ragged herself, and some of what we're doing without training is best handled on the other side of the border. We haven't the capacity, and it serves no one's interests to have the job done badly." He says, "It wasn't until she reminded me that I hadn't the NEWTs or the A-levels, that it really sank in. And that Great Stone God who was sitting in judgment… is all pose." His voice breaks. "I had to believe that I was in the right, and doing the right thing… because the alternative ..."
She's peering into the abyss with him, the darkness out of which may come a Dark Lord who once was a little girl with pigtails, just as Tom Riddle was once a little boy with unruly hair, just as any of the Death Eaters had once been children in their turn. The devils in the hell on earth are only human, after all, and had once been babies and then small children.
At length he says, "It's the Gryffindor way, isn't it? Muddling through. Charging in even when we know fuck-all about what we're doing."
"The magical equivalent of brain surgery, yes." She shivers.
"Derwent's actually pretty optimistic about that, I think." He says, "You should talk to her about it, because she didn't seem all that ruffled about the prognosis." He says, "Gran has the notion that she's going to make you an offer of an apprenticeship after the trials."
"She told you that?"
"Heavens, no. I overheard her talking to Percy Weasley. The two of them are thick as thieves." He adds, in a tone of amusement, "Slytherins, the both of them."
"Gran and Percy?"
"No, Gran and Derwent. Half the sport is conspiring together, and the other half is trying to outmaneuver each other."
Hermione frowns. "Are there any Muggle-born Healers? I thought they were all from Pureblood families."
"Pureblood Healer families. The Derwents and the Smethwycks and a half-dozen others. But they're not opposed to new blood. It just has to be above the usual standard." He amends, "The usual standard being ten or more NEWTs with O's in all."
"Sounds like the Aurors."
"It's more or less the same, except that the Healers usually take Slytherins or Ravenclaws."
"And the Aurors?"
"Gryffindor and Hufflepuff. For the most part. Shacklebolt is a Ravenclaw, but they've always been DMLE."
"I see." It requires a real effort not to sound bitter, and she's sure she doesn't manage it. "Pureblood strongholds, all of them."
"Er, yes." He says, very much with the air of asking something he doesn't quite dare, "Do you… think less of Purebloods?"
"In general or in your particular case?"
There's an awkward pause. "In particular." He sounds miserable, and she squeezes his arm reassuringly.
"Neville, I didn't think of anyone as a Pureblood until the war. Really. Malfoy was a prat and Ron was annoying but fanciable and McLaggen was a lout, and Lavender and Parvati were annoying beyond words, and Ginny… Ginny was utterly fearless."
He says, "Yes. And now she's in a bad way."
She doesn't know if he's in on the conspiracy, so she keeps silent until he adds, "Percy told me that we'll be doing something about that very soon." He says, "And he said that you were to play a part." She keeps her face carefully expressionless. He says, "Thank you. I mean, after what she did to you…" She thinks, you don't know the half of it.
He says, "She and I, during the war, you know…"
"Neville, you don't have to…"
"I owe you. I've been demanding explanations of you, and …" He stops stock still, and says, "We didn't quite discuss it, you know, but it didn't exactly happen spontaneously either…"
That brief episode with Ginny had been a foxhole romance, passion born of adrenalin and sleep deprivation and the love of comrades in a hopeless cause and the knowledge they could die any time, and horribly. He knew even then that if they survived, it wasn't going anywhere. She was going to wait for Harry, and if Harry died, she was going to mourn for him. But it felt good at the time. Very good. Comforting.
Hermione nods. Her late madness aside, this goes a way to explain Ginny's ferocious protectiveness. Her ears are still stinging from the Howler that wound up with "and what's this I hear about Neville?"
He tells the story, bits of which she knows already, but this time with ruthless frankness: that he knew it was Harry that Ginny imagined when they had their arms around each other, the night they learned that Luna had been taken. For his own part, he was imagining … at first he'd thought he was imagining Luna, because he'd fancied her a bit—especially after they were all sent to do their detention in the Forbidden Forest with Hagrid—but in the throes of passion, eyes closed and those small strong hands holding on to him, he knew whom he wanted, and how hopeless it was.
How hopeless it might still be. How hopeless it had been, seven years… it felt ridiculous when it didn't feel shameful. After all this, with his Gran and the Senior Healer contending to attach her as apprentice and heir… well, that was now. Then, it had been Ron…
She reminds him that she's not with Ron, hasn't been… she catches herself before she says, "in a year and a half." That's how long it's been, at least, in her timeline. What she does say is that she's well over Ron, and Lavender has made overtures of friendship. Things are different. And there are things she hasn't said, on her side, things that might make a difference.
He tells her that they can talk about that later, and puts an arm around her, and they look at the castle against the smoky evening sky.
ooo
From the journal of Hermione Granger
20 December 1998, late evening
The plot thickens, as the writer of a Victorian triple-decker might put it. Two owls arrived tonight as we were eating supper in the Great Hall.
The first was the whimsical Pigwidgeon, beating his little wings valiantly. I fed him morsels from my plate, and he looked pleased with himself as I untied the message from his leg: an invitation for Christmas dinner, signed by Molly Weasley.
Accept the invitation, no matter how strange it is.
I wrote my acceptance at the foot of the original invitation, and continued to ply the plucky little owl with treats. It is a long way, in the cold, from the Burrow to Hogwarts.
Neville read it, looking over my shoulder, and smiled. He reached over and fed a bit of roast chicken to Pigwidgeon, while smiling at me. I didn't miss his meaning; he'd like to hand-feed me with treats as well, and delay my departure into the cold and snow as long as possible.
Dessert was served, and Neville continued to regard me with that curiously smoldering glance, even as the redoubtable owl of Augusta Longbottom glided in to a majestic landing. The dish of owl treats materialized (the Hogwarts house elves must know this owl) and Augusta's bird helped itself, then proffered the message.
I am invited tomorrow to Longbottom House, to accompany Madam Longbottom for a bit of apprentice-work, a rare opportunity to view and improve some magical defenses in the modern style. Nothing truly Dark, but as close to the boundary as one gets without crossing over.
That invitation, too, has been accepted.
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Author's note: Thanks to the reader or readers who nominated this fic for the Deathly Hallow Awards (Best Work in Progress). Voting is open through 30 December 2010. To vote, see the link on my profile. Be warned: there are over 300 nominations, a true feast of reading for lovers of HP fanfic.
Hermione's current reading: Karl von Clausewitz. On War; Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince and The Art of War. Clausewitz made his observations of great undertakings gone awry during the Napoleonic Wars, including the famous Russian campaign of 1812 during which he served among the German military advisers to Czar Alexander I. His souvenirs of that campaign included permanent facial disfigurement from frostbite. Machiavelli's hard-won political wisdom was acquired some centuries earlier, in the warring city-states of Renaissance Italy, at the price of torture and exile.
