Hello, dear readers. Allow me to begin with a bit of an A/N preface:

It is 4:51, August 4th 2022 and I've just finished writing the final line for the epilogue for this story. That means that it is written in full and now only requires posting.

It has been a wild ride writing this story, and it is very personal to me on a number of levels. (Not really plot wise, but because of how it followed me through some of the most foundational moments of my life: going from living in a 900sqft apartment to buying a house and having our first baby). When I started writing this, I couldn't envision that we'd ever accomplish those two things, but as I'm writing this preface, I have my six-month-old daughter laying on me for a cuddle. Life comes at you fast.

I hope that you'll enjoy the story, which is complete in 50 chapters, and that you'll remember that I wrote this for myself and am choosing to share it. Your reviews do not drive me to write, nor will they change the story based on feedback, so while I will appreciate kind, constructive, or respectful comments, flames will not be tolerated. I don't expect everyone will like this story, or how I've chosen to characterize the major players, but some of you will. This story is for you.

It is quite long, and even though the major ship is HG/SS, one of our pair won't show up for several chapters. I realize that you may feel impatient to see this character. As a consession, I will be updating chapters DAILY until the second of the pair appears. After that, I'm planning on a twice-a-week posting schedule until it is published in full. And on that note, while it is an HG/SS pairing, and mostly an HG/SS story, there is a lot in the story which does not revolve around our favorite pair of brains on legs, so bear with me: I hope you'll come for the pairing and stay for the story... or the reverse. Either or!

I would like to thank my husband for serving as my beta reader for this entire adventure. He's now read far more HGSS fic than I'm sure he ever bargained for upon marrying me. I'd also like to thank the friends I made in my HP discord: without you cheering me on these last few months I'm not sure I would have had the nerve or stamina to finish. Also, all thanks and glory to J.K. Rowling, whose writing, world and characters have improved my life so very much.

This story contains no lemons! The rating is for language.

"They say that life's a carousel

Spinning fast, you gotta ride it well

The world is full of Kings and Queens

Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams

It's Heaven and Hell, oh well"

"Heaven and Hell" – Black Sabbath

On the outskirts of London stood blocks upon blocks of buildings. Some of them were of crumbling brick construction. Some of them were held together by sad cladding and steel beams which seemed to have been assembled in a muggle game of Jenga.

It was the district that all muggle politicians had seemingly forgotten. Pledges to clean up and redevelop the old tenements, factories, and warehouses had been decades, perhaps even a century in development: yet whenever the deadline to pay a firm for demolition approached a flurry of bureaucratic inefficiency and political grift would surface in the press. Heads of departments would be disgraced, cronies outed, and the district remained.

No one seemed to be sure whether anyone remained living in the shoddy district, a place colloquially known to politicians and Londoners alike as Waldweirness-on-Thames, and the streets were almost universally avoided by all.

Attempts to take a census had been, again, decades in the offing. Every so often an upstart of a politician would make it a cornerstone of his campaign to revitalize Waldweirness-on-Thames. Once in a blue moon the campaign would materialize into an actual political career and Waldweirness would see a team of photographers and reporters descend upon the cracked pavement of the streets and kerb to document everything that they could for the rest of the public to devour in the papers.

It made good press: Waldweirness-on-Thames was possessed of that inexorable draw so many decrepit and decaying industrial sites had. It was picturesque. It was hideous. It was a hopeful example for the future, it was a damning condemnation of the past. It was inevitable, unfortunately, that within weeks or months of garnering national attention, Waldweirness would empty of its spectators and become the sad, seemingly empty borough east of London proper that time would, yet again, forget.

There were officials who had supposed ownership over Waldweirness' state. They were the odd sort. Rarely seen from or heard from, these men should rightly have been nearing 120 years old if the public record of their terms were accurately reflected in the archives.

Some reporters even got close to discovering their names, addresses, offices. Close to the publication of a tell-all article about who owned ultimate responsibility for Waldweirness, the principal author and investigative journalist on the project was found, almost insensate, wandering the halls of a Waldweirness factory floor. A group of elderly ladies had been making a regular noon-time trip throughout the area when they had happened upon him, mumbling to himself and trying to pry open the managerial office of an old soap-making tycoon.

The journalists' reappearance and mental state bore the entirety of the attention in the press and everyone seemed to forget or ignore the curiosity presented by a group of septuagenarians wandering through condemned buildings at their apparent leisure, and with enough regularity that they would have had cause to walk up to the upper levels of the factory in order to see who may have been near the former offices of the plant managers.

The group of ladies was never questioned or attributed quotation in the press. Their names were never collected, and they had made no record in any official police capacity. They existed within the scope of the story, and then seemed to exist no further.

Waldweirness would rise to the top of priority lists in a cyclical fashion before it was buried, with enough fervour and in such a state of panic by officials, that it came of no surprise to the Prime Minister in 2005 to find another ground-swell of support for its rehabilitation.

It was the second time in his administration's history that he had had to punt Waldweirness back to its ownership. Early in his career, the summer of 00', was the first time Waldweirness-on-Thames became known to him as a point of contention. It was an earmarked location in the Party's literature: a crown jewel of a project sure to bring accolades and good press to whomever could conquer the mountain of problems, fiscal and structural, which the site presented. Teams had been dispatched to review locations for more council housing. Lobbyists from major super-market chains had vied for contracts and land to raise up a Tesco and a Sainsbury's for the new prospective population.

Development had already reached a fever pitch, the Prime Minister even having participated in an over-the-top photo-op of himself in a white hard hat, shaking hands with city planners and investors before it all crashed and smoldered around his ears. The only saving grace of the endeavour was that it was as if it had never happened. He received no bad press from the fall-out, and never heard again from those who had already sunk millions of pounds into the pledged projects. Not a whimper, not a cross word. When he had cause to rub elbows with the investors later, they addressed him with no animosity. It was the ultimate relief and the ultimate axe over his neck. Had he gone further, the Prime Minister knew, he would have been made to forget too.

For Waldweirness-on-Thames was owned already, and its ownership was both territorial and had an active mounted defense: as the Prime Minister now had cause to know. It had been the first time in his term that he was contacted through the ancient portrait hanging in Downing Street.

It happened on a fateful night in July of 2000. The Prime Minister, in his sunny optimism had been poring over blueprints for proposed hotels and waterfront greenspaces when he was addressed sharply from the portrait in his office.

"Excuse me, Prime Minister!"

He startled and dislodged his reading glasses from the bridge of his nose. At a glance there was no one in the room with him, yet there had been a voice— clear as a bell, or more truthfully a rather annoying trumpet.

"Er… hello?" he stood, knocking the chair back several feet against the wall. Clearing his throat, he tried again: "Hello!? Who's there! I can have security up here in a snap—"

"Minister, Minister, please!"

Strangely, his eyes picked up movement on the wall across the room from him. The portrait above the old, mostly unused fireplace seemed to be moving. The Minister moved to flip the main light switch, throwing the rest of the room into a fluorescent glow.

The man in the painting shielded his eyes in a somewhat melodramatic fashion, "Really? Oh really? Is this necessary?"

"You can talk!" The Prime Minister proclaimed, rather stupidly. Recouping his faculties, he strode forward to face the portrait. "What are you?"

"Well, a portrait, naturally!"

"You've never spoken before,"

"I never had been called to before now. Rest assured it would have been far better for me to have spoken with you when you were first elected, but we were encountering some… civil unrest here, it's only now that our Ministry's been brought under manners so to speak." He bobbed his head in a sort of apologetic bow with his words.

The portrait's words had raised too many questions, the Prime Minister was stumped as to how to respond.

"Who is we? What do you mean civil unrest? And who—or what—is your Ministry?"

"All in good time, all in good time, Prime Minister! We ask, humbly, for a meeting this evening between yourself and our Minister for Magic. We enjoyed a long and mostly amicable relationship with your predecessors."

"For Magic? Is that what this is? Some magic trick?" He began furiously running his hands over the mouldings, feeling along the ancient masonry. He lifted the portrait and inspected the back side. It was nothing but paper, nailed to a wooden frame. There was a faint signature, but nothing else. The portrait was dated to the early eighteenth century.

"What are you doing, man?! Put me down this instant!"

"Where are your cables? Where are the wires!? I don't see any video feed—"

"What on Earth are you talking about, fool Muggle! Put me down!"

The portrait slammed back down in the Prime Minister's anger. "What did you call me?"

The portrait looked embarrassed by his loss of composure. He huffed and fluffed for a moment, going very red in the face, before he responded. "Apologies, my apologies, Prime Minister! If you will forgive me, I will inform the Minister that you await him."

"But where will we meet?"

The portrait was turning to open a door at the back of his painted room, half-way out, "Do step away from the fireplace, Sir." He disappeared from view.

"…The fireplace," The Minister glanced at the ancient stone maw, it's cast-iron teeth wide and gaping. He took a cautionary step back, hardly believing that he was actually going along with his hallucination's suggestions. The grate was empty still, he waited a moment. Nothing came.

The Prime Minister chuckled and turned back to his desk. Too much brandy at the meet and greet earlier. That was it.

He toppled his chair for the second time that evening when a bright green WOOSH! lit his study. From his position on the floor he watched as a portly man with an almost entirely bald head stepped out of the green flames. He turned and dusted soot off his pinstripe trousers. He had a single lock of greying-red hair that clung to the top of his otherwise bald scalp, and it fell in a jaunty curled lock on his forehead. His moustache was enormous and the color of burnished copper. It fell past his chin and against the brown corduroy of his jacket.

The bald man's entire ensemble was odd, but it wasn't enough to view him in light of what he was wearing—the man had appeared out of a burst of green fire, and was now surveying the Prime Minister as he lay on the floor. A hearty laugh echoed into the room. He extended his hand and assisted his muggle counterpart up onto his feet.

"Always wanted to do that! Apologies, Mr. Prime Minister— there's not exactly a good way of breaking it to you, eh? I offer the Ministry's most sincere apologies that we haven't reached out sooner, you see, we were experiencing a spot of—"

"Civil unrest?" The Prime Minister supplied. He raised an eyebrow at the portly wizard, whose bald head started to shine with a bit of perspiration.

"Yes, yes. Glad you were filled in on that." The wizard threw a murderous look toward the portrait, who was now back in his frame, as stock still as ever.

The man's barrel chest puffed out as he cleared his throat and offered his hand, this time in greeting. "Barnam Aethelfromm, Mr. Prime Minister, Minister for Magic. I was only recently elected myself. As I understand it, no one from Thicknesse's or Shacklebolt's administrations ever contacted you?"

"Minister Aethelfromm, I can assure you—"

"Barnam, please!"

"Barnam. No one from your world has ever contacted me before. I don't know a Shacklebolt, or a Thicknesse, and no, I can't say I've spoken to representatives from either administration."

"Perhaps that's for the best," Aethelfromm murmered, his sausage like fingers rubbing thoughtfully against his chin and cheek. "Pius Thicknesse was installed as a part of a greater coup,"

The Prime Minister's face must have shown his discomfiture at the news.

"And Kingsley Shacklebolt was installed in the interim until his unfortunate passing.

"The Portrait," Aethelfromm threw another venomous look at the silent painting, "has misrepresented the scope of our recent turmoil. We were at war, Prime Minister. Pius Thicknesse was installed by a group of ideologues after their murder of Rufus Scrimgeour, who, I understand, did speak to your predecessor before things quite… fell apart."

Minister Aethelfromm seemed to pause and gaze about the room before he continued, "The history of the magical world's most recent war is beyond the scope of what I wish to discuss with you. The war is over, and you no longer have to worry that these… ideologues will overturn any more bridges any time soon—"

"THAT WAS YOU?!" The Prime Minister thundered, yet his rage flagged within seconds, choked by his sudden certainty that this man could crush him underfoot—for, what on earth did a wizarding war entail exactly? His eyes bugged out of their sockets.

Aethelfromm watched with resignation as the muggle clutched at his chest nervously. "Prime Minister, might I recommend you sit down? I shouldn't like to cause a heart attack."

"It's just angina." The muggle intoned, though he did take a seat.

"All the same. It was not us. When the Death Eaters had committed that act in particular, they had not yet taken over our Ministry. We have rooted them out. I personally took care to crush each and every one of them."

The gleam in Minister Aethelfromm's eyes was eerie to witness, and briefly the muggle Minister wondered whether the wizarding community was subject to the Geneva Convention's laws. He suspected the answer was no.

"Good." Disgustingly, it came out as a piteous squeak. Hastily, the Prime Minister cast about for a way to make the mad Minister in front of him disappear. "So, we've met. And the war is over— is there anything else we have to discuss, Minis—Barnam?"

His evasive maneuvering was met with a warm chuckle, the malice having disappeared from Aethelfromm's eyes. He wagged a stocky finger at the muggle Minister and took a departing step towards the fireplace. "One thing, one thing only, Prime Minister."

"What can I help you with?"

To the Prime Minister's amazement Barnam Aethelfromm pointed at the blueprints and plans on his desk, "You are familiar with Waldweirness-on-Thames." It wasn't a question.

"Erm, yes—we're almost through with planning for a full restoration project," Aethelfromm began to shake his head mournfully. The wizard clucked his tongue in a show of sympathy. The Prime Minister offered a last feeble protest: "The vendors have been paid…"

"I'm afraid, Prime Minister, that you'll find the plans have been cancelled. Fear not, you'll suffer no indignity—it was a valiant effort on your part. I quite liked the plan for the winter ice rink myself—but Waldweirness is a place of magic. You'll find any attempts to reappropriate or redevelop it to be dead on arrival, I'm afraid."

"What do you mean I'll 'suffer no indignity?'"

"Why, there will be no one to remember the plans, nor the payments made, nor the orders drafted and signed."

The Prime Minister paled. "You don't mean…"

Aethelfromm frowned in confusion before he caught his meaning: "No! No, no Prime Minister, they are all quite safe—I assure you! Their memories have been rescinded. I agree that it's quite barbaric, but it's the best and safest bet all around."

The muggle Minister knew his face was slack jawed at that easy admission of guilt but he was feeling increasingly desperate to usher the wizard out of his study.

"So… Waldweirness. Is there anything left for me to do, or have... have your people taken care of it?"

Aethelfromm looked pleased at something, though the Prime Minister could hardly discern what that might be. "No, though I do expect in the future that you withhold Waldweirness from any more attempts at development. It is by far preferable that no ones' minds are tampered with, eh?" It seemed as if the wizard's pale grey eye twinkled once at him with the pronouncement.

The muggle affected his most diplomatic countenance and took a half bow toward his guest. "It will be done." He attempted a smile. It may have wobbled a bit.

"Good to meet you, Prime Minister. I expect we'll have further cause to meet over the years, though hopefully under better circumstances." Without waiting for a response, Barnam Aethelfromm whipped about and released a stream of what looked like gunpowder into the grate from his hand. The green flames leapt from the stones to his palm. "The Minister for Magic's office!" He exclaimed as he strode into the flames. The flames remained for a moment, smoldering green, before they puffed out of existence.

In the years interceding the Muggle Minister had hoped that he would have little cause for further confrontation with Wizarding England. He had been assured many times that wizarding-kind had their own laws, their own enforcement, and their own social rules and mores to which they would hold themselves. It had been his understanding, and admittedly a flawed one at that, that they did not encroach in physical space upon Muggle London or, indeed, in the rest of Great Britain. Waldweirness disabused him of this notion, however. There was something there. Something behind the faltering façade of ruined industry.

The Minister for Magic was not inclined to share with the Prime Minister the locations for ingress into Wizarding Britain: the gateways were well protected, and most of the locations were packed away into wizarding space—undetectable and unplottable by muggle cartographers. The Prime Minister thought he could possibly recall talk of a wizarding shopping district, somewhere in the heart of London, and a train platform, but beyond these two most relevant enclaves of activity he possessed no other insights into his magical constituency's whereabouts.

In 2005, when the second proposal crossed his desk, he only sighed with resignation and aroused the attention of the portrait. "Tell Barnam that another proposal has arisen for Waldweirness—I'm killing it as we speak, but I want him to know of the interest."

"Naturally," the portrait returned smoothly. He stepped out the back door of his painting and returned some ten minutes later. "He has told me to relay to you that he wishes for you to keep an eye on the situation. He wants to know immediately if Obliviators will be necessary."

In the five years that the Prime Minister had known of magic he had had only two incidents requiring the use of Obliviators. Begrudgingly, he acknowledged their necessity. It had been a hard-taught lesson. "I'll let him know."

He planned with iron-clad resolution not to endorse the proposals, nor to network amongst the backers.

He would not introduce one banker to another architecture firm. He would obfuscate, bury. Waldweirness-on-Thames must stay untouched. Somehow the Prime Minister understood that his memory, and his career, were predicated upon keeping the good faith of the wizarding community, or at least of Barnam Aethelfromm. The man was wily and seemed to have a disingenuous sense of charisma. The Prime Minister knew that he probably only saw his disingenuousness because Barnam had wanted him to. He didn't respect the Muggle Minister, clearly—he hadn't even asked his name!

In the end, the Prime Minister never did put forth the effort to conduct a census. He had to assume that anyone living on the premises was of magical stock. It was hopeless. A sovereign nation inside the heart of London. Spotted out in enclaves throughout Great Britain like a network of freckles.

Or cancer. He thought darkly.

He balked at the notion. Surely, most wizards and witches were not like Barnam Aethelfromm. Of course, they supposedly had dangerous ideologues who went around calling themselves Death Eaters and overturning bridges—he couldn't claim the non-magical world didn't have plenty of its own dangerous extremists. To call the wizards a cancer would be his own dangerous step toward extremism. It was likely that none of the magical folk had cast ballots for him, but they were his constituency nonetheless.

Thus Waldweirness-on-Thames remained a mysterious hub of sorts for curious folks who seemingly should have no earthly business in being there. Most notably was the overwhelming presence of the elderly. Whenever the Prime Minister visited the streets himself, out of his sense of curiosity if for no other reason, he noticed that some three fourths of the regulars were all old. They wandered in packs, friends bickering back and forth and sometimes he saw married couples. There were a few young folks, some of them rushed about looking worried and overburdened, while others seemed to be disturbed on some level.

It was a fascinating and curious dichotomy, but he felt too apprehensive to push forward and learn more about the magical world. It was enough to observe that there were, indeed, people living in Waldweirness, and not only would he be doing them a great harm by moving against their community, but their community would also oppose him with ferocity.

And they'll tell you black is really white

The moon is just the sun at night

And when you walk in golden halls

You get to keep the gold that falls

It's Heaven and Hell, oh no!

"Heaven and Hell" (reprise) – Black Sabbath

A/N: This work will contain many additional illustrations. I'll let you know when a chapter has a corresponding piece of art attached. For the cover photo (shown as a thumbnail on FFN) you can find the full artwork on my Deviant Art. My username is the same: Mothboss, and this particular piece will be uploaded as "Assisted Living." Enjoy!