Chapter Sixty-Seven: Victory
"Well, what now?" Mel mumbled to herself. "Shall we carry old Voldy's head in on a pike?"
"On a fish?" Theodoric asked.
"No! F'rchrissakes, Theo, I –er, forgot you were in here!"
"A pike is a fish, ma'am."
"No, not a pike like a fish, a pike like a…oh, gods." The hooker-turned-lieutenant sighed and cracked open a soda from her Colonel's stash. "What's going on with the cellephones?" This term was a confusion-born blend of 'cellular' and 'telephones' and worked surprisingly well. Theodoric smiled.
"Ever'one's singin' and laughin' and askin' where the heck each other are."
"Oh. Well, have you gotten in touch with La- -your Auntie Cassandra yet?"
"Na."
"Where is that girl? I swear, she and John are pulled over someplace with the…"
"Wasn' Professah Snape an' my cousin Draco goin' with them?"
"A little thing like that wouldn't faze your auntie." Mel plugged her headset into a different jack and dialed a cellephone number. "Hello? Oh, christ –I mean…Tonks! Hello! …Oh. …Right. Well, what's going on? …Really? Have they found…oh. …Oh. …Well. …Alright. I'll try my best. Later!" She hung up and turned to the five-year-old. "You know, I get the distinct impression you and I won't get to tell our side of it."
"Of what?"
"Never mind. Have we got any more pretzels?"
"Donaghan's got the bag."
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Harry sighed and tucked his wand into his jeans pocket. It was over. People were shouting and dancing and crying on each other and generally releasing all the tension that had been building up for years. Only he and Dumbledore were quiet.
"Is it really over?" Harry asked doubtfully.
"Don't you know, Harry?" The old wizard's twinkling eyes were bright. "It never really is. I thought it was over when we defeated Grindelwald. The Muggles thought it was over when the First World War ended in surrender. Mark my words, something will go wrong in the next few days, or months, or years, that will guarantee our children see another great cause and fight. For the Muggles the Treaty of Versailles did it. For my generation, it was our failure to teach the lesson that pure blood isn't everything, and our failure to find one infant boy in an orphanage." Harry looked at the burned place in the leaves where the Dark Lord had finally fallen and sighed again. "All we can do now is try our hardest to prevent that something from happening, rest a while, and not get a stomachache at the celebration party from pumpkin tarts. I remember being quite hung-over the next day in 1945."
It was such a classically Dumbledorean statement that Harry couldn't help but smile. A second later, a bright beam of light lit up that smile and made him squint.
"Holy-!"
"You've driven right into the bloody woods!"
"I can't help that! The car's going nuts on me!"
"Maybe Dingo wants to mate with the Anglia."
"Sevvy, you shut your facetious, sarcastic mouth!"
"When is car mating season, anyway?"
"Hermione! Not you, too!"
"Hermione?!"
Harry ran into the light and saw two scruffy figures trying to turn off the engine of a now-parked black convertible. It was Cass and Draco, arguing like Ginny and Ron with a faulty broom. John Tyler seemed to be admiring the scenery of the woods in his detached way, Professor Snape was actually smiling –grinning, even, and leaning against him was Hermione, safe, well, and home.
"Harry! How are you? What's going on?"
"Hermione!" Harry gasped again. "We…Voldemort's dead! It's all over."
"What?" A very indignant werewolf tumbled out of the car and fell into the leaves before standing up and righting herself. "Already?"
"I suspected it," Severus mumbled, feeling his forearm. He looked at Hermione and smiled. "All in one day."
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Dinner the next evening was a grand affair, despite the fact that there had been no homemade food prepared and the Great Hall was a little short of tables and the house-elves for once seemed to prefer dancing with glee about Voldemort's demise than actually serving the pizza Dean Thomas and Tonks obtained. Mel made a call on the cellephone to a certain house full of unsavorily employed females and there was enough soda and Muggle booze to drown a Quidditch team. Cass and she drove out in Dingo to pick it up and also returned with a questionably obtained fifty-gallon drum of fudge ripple ice cream in time for lunch. John and Severus personally ate roughly a fifth of it.
The students were allowed to go home in honor of the great holiday if their parents wished, so by the time evening rolled around Hogwarts had become a sort of party house. Classrooms that had already been converted into hospital rooms just in case of casualties or wounds were rapidly re-charmed to resemble those of an especially nice hotel. More than one couple sought to…er, celebrate privately at various intervals, some simply wanted to crash before returning to feast and dance anew, and quite a few hung-over ones needed Madam Pomfrey's help.
Quartermaster Molly Weasley presided happily over a humming kitchen of gleeful house-elves who wanted nothing better than to make large quantities of their most challenging and beloved desserts. Work was a house-elf's joy, after all, so huge craggy mountains of Norwegian ice cream, acres of sheet cakes, cookies enough to re-shingle the roof and just barely enough of Draco's favorite pie all appeared as the pizza boxes were stacking up empty.
In the Hospital Wing proper, Hermione endured a thorough check-up and was pronounced more or less well, apart from malnutrition and what looked like severe exhaustion. Madam Pomfrey suggested a combination of potions to try and call forth her memories of captivity, but Hermione declined. After all, any potion that could call up memories of the past few months could also call up what she had been up to at any other time. She didn't want to betray any pranks of Harry and Ron –or any secrets that could prove distressing to the wrong people. Reluctantly, Madam Pomfrey allowed her to go down and celebrate, provided she didn't over-exert herself.
This may have been a mistake.
It was in the midst of many toasts that a vaguely tipsy Draco rose and tapped his glass with a fork. His mother was back with singed hair, a fuzzy memory and a heaping pile of Krispy Kremes beside her martini glass. Madam Pomfrey had offered her the potions, but Narcissa was still a little too out of it to agree or disagree with any certainty. (Of course, that may have been the result of Dobby elf's martinis…) In any case, Draco proposed a toast to the two first American Aurors –and continued:
"These two have done a lot for Great Britain –an' the world…and they've got a secret but I bet if we asked nice they'd –hic! -tell us all."
They didn't even have to say anything. John, blushing a little red, just slipped his arm around his wife and grinned.
"You're not!"
"Congratulations!"
"Oh, per'fessor! When?"
"In June." Cass, for once, didn't look like a sick werewolf who missed her friend. Her dark circles and pale complexion had given way to a strange, but not unknown radiance. Little Donaghan and Theodoric, who both knew, happily took turns speaking into her navel, and the identical Mrs. Weasleys eagerly compared anecdotes. Fred, George and John formed a sort of expectant fathers' club, which mainly seemed to be debating the likelihood of the incipient heirs' Quidditch abilities. Several bets were placed by various parties on all three babies' possible weights, lengths, genders, Houses and positions, though when Severus spoke noone doubted his veracity:
"The Weasleys will be boys, twenty-one and twenty-one and one-quarter inches respectively, eight pounds four ounces each, born an hour apart, and they'll be Gryffindor Beaters. The little Tyler will be a twenty-eight inch, eight-pound ten-ounce girl, and she's a Keeper. Twenty Galleons on the lot."
"But which House, Sevvy?" Cass inquired.
"That's entirely up to her, now, isn't it?" Severus smiled in the direction of his friend's belt buckle. "Get to work, by the way, we need a good Keeper." He leaned back in his chair and, without thinking, slipped an arm around Hermione. "Would you care to make an announcement like that sometime with me?"
"I believe I would."
"Before we lost you, I asked a question once. I don't know if you remember it…" Severus reached into his pocket and retrieved not a little box, but a leather pouch. He set his thumb on the clasp and it snapped open, evidently charmed to his fingerprint. It was an elegant but simple platinum band. "I forget how I originally asked this, but…"
"The answer's yes, Severus." Hermione smiled and the professor gently kissed her, slipping the ring onto her finger. "I love you, you know."
"And I, you."
"I won't go away again."
It suddenly hit the newly affianced couple that the room had fairly rapidly gone silent just near them. Slowly, they turned their heads away from each other.
Staring, jaws dropped, were eleven Weasleys, two Tylers, three Tonkses, one Potter, two Lovegoods, a Lupin, a Dumbledore and a Watling. The Tylers' stares turned to grins in a twinkling.
"Proposing already, Severus?" John inquired. "What a wonderful night for it."
"I do hope you said yes, Hermione," Cass agreed. Nervously, the caught couple nodded. Mel Watling suddenly clapped her hands and pointed at Tonks.
"Ten points! I told you those two'd wind up together eventually. Pay up!"
"Er…" The reunited lovers both managed to look guilty. "I suppose an explanation's rather in order…"
"Oh, I think we can all get some more ice cream first," Luna observed. Everyone turned to stare at her. "After all, it's merely the fulfillment of eons-old prophecy. I wonder where the badger got to."
"What prophecy?" Molly asked.
"You know, the one about the Four Founders' reincarnation at the close of the century in time for the dawning of the age of Aquarius. It's simply chance that Gryffindor wound up with Slytherin this time. In another thousand years I bet it'll be Hufflepuff."
Luna's eccentricity helped to clear matters up and smooth over the dreadful, but not quite so dreadful, shock. While it is not certain whether there was anything true in her talk of prophecy, the argument of just which House each of the four represented was a joke between them forevermore. Whenever Cass wanted to make her 'big brother Sevvy' bristle, all she had to do was call him 'Gryffindor'.
The war was over, and new lives had just begun for all.