1
"Sorry, mom. Sorry, dad.", Selene called as she raced past them in the lobby. "She might still be in her office."
Scarmander looked to his wife. "Yes, I've seen where she's going, dear." Luna sighed. "Entirely too long ago.
"You did pack the Pepper-Up potion?"
2
There she was. Unlike her mother's habit of putting her wand behind her ear, this woman held it between her teeth. She never had a chance at putting it away, as she danced files wordlessly back and forth to the catacombs behind her desk and unfolded the paper airplanes that flew around the Ministry only to quill them and flick them off again. She was the apitome of efficiency, matriarch of information, the Brightest Witch of Her (previous) Age.
Hermione Jean Granger looked up. "Are you lost? Do you need help finding your mum?"
"No, Deputy Director Granger.", Selene said with all smiles. She walked forward with a hand firmly extended. "I'm the Lady Prince."
The woman regarded the girl anew. She shook her hand. "Your mother has told me much about you."
"My mother is still friends with you after the war? And she never introduced me to you? But she knows that you're my heroine! I have your campaign poster for Secretary of Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures on my bedroom wall."
Hermione frowned. "Your mother only told me that dabberblimps bounced between us."
Selene frowned as well. "Why would she think one of us would go unconscious if we met, I wonder."
"I'm sorry?", Granger challenged.
"Oh.", Selene startled. "My mother is synesthetic. You're muggleborn so/"
Hermione rolled her eyes and face palmed. "I should have known. I owe your mother so many apologies.
"I never got along with Divination or Hogwarts' Divination professor. So even when I was on the run because of a prophecy, I hadn't understood the proper nature of seers. But you're telling me that one of Luna's neurodivergences..."
Selene shrugged.
"Um...mental illness?", the woman hesitantly offered.
The girl nodded. "Yes. Unlike a muggle with the condition of having the brain misdirecting nerves so that they perceive the wrong sense with the wrong lobe, so that they smell colors or taste sounds, mom's magical. So it's more that the part of our core that allows us to perceive magical creatures is also how her mother's gift is being processed by her mind. So instead of us seeing a threstral but only if we've seen a soul leave a body and normal magical effects, she's also Seeing with the same perception.
"Wait. You think she has others? Illnesses?"
Granger face continued to fall. She did not want a little girl who just admitted to hero worship to hear only negative things from her about her mother. Luna was a friend and a war legend, one who paid about as heavy a sacrifice and remained among them. "Well. She...do you understand the term 'on the spectrum'?"
"You believe she's a form of autistic?", Selene mused. "She's never seemed to be withdrawn from the conversations around her."
"You know what autism is?", the woman pressed. "Most wizards never approach psychology outside of mind spells."
"Well, I am the Brightest Witch of My Age.", the Lady Prince boasted. "So just to not be caught off guard, I pursued a muggle education by correspondence before Hogwarts. I'm credited to sit university classes in the muggle world."
Hermione stared at her. "er...introductory university classes?", Selene offered.
The woman allowed a few more airplanes to rest on her desk. "No, no. It's just that I hadn't finished my muggle education until I had my Masters in both Transfiguration and Charms. I only pursued undergraduate work in chemical engineering after my Masters in Potions."
"But what can I help you with? That you made your way to my office for?"
"To meet you!", Selene stated excitedly. "Like I said, you're one of my heroines. The muggleborn prodigy that was the front line brains calculating out in realtime the complex plans and conspiracies that Headmaster Dumbledore had decades to plot out. The teen enchantment designer. How could you not inspire me?"
Hermione smiled. "And who else am I keeping illustrious company with. You did use the plural."
Selene returned her smile. "Bellatrix LeStrange nee Black."
Granger stopped smiling. "What?"
"The front line genius of you-know-who's machinations. Battlefield commander, rogue agent, and the record setter for most N.E.W.T.S. completed. Her work with space-time continuum ward breaking was as fascinating as her matrix based transifiguration calculations for the first time turners.", Selene explained.
"I've tried to piece together your battle. The storm you conjured to destroy Malfoy manor that she then summoned a volcano to force your retreat. I still haven't figured out exactly what she must have combined to do that in combat while co-locating but I did have some ideas...
"What?"
Hermione was glaring at the child. But she took a few breaths to remeber, 'the Lady Prince' was still Luna's eleven year old daughter. Even as she pulled her sleeves down over her wrists.
"Do you want to see it?", she offered. "My...battle...with Bellatrix LeStrange?"
"You have a pensieve here?" Selene clapped. And then she face palmed. "Of course you do! As Deputy Director of the Department for Magical Law Enforcement, you'd have to be able to review interrogations and collected and submitted memories.
"Ma'am, I would absolutely love to witness the Battle of Malfoy Manor."
Hermione dragged her office' pensieve out into the open. She then walked up to one of the case jackets in the wall and pulled out a vial with a shimmering, silvery memory twirling within. She cut Selene's question off with "It's healthier this way. I pulled the actual memory out of my head. One of the ministry's oblivators destroyed what was left. I've viewed it of course. But having witnessed it in third person, I understand why I did what I did."
The woman dropped the memory into the viewing device. "Ready?"
"I've literally been anticipating this my entire life.", Selene responded.
They both leaned into the memory presented.
The second thing Selene noticed was how little of the scene there was. Bellatrix, certainly. Not the legendary beauty that would launch a genocide and ensnare even the Dark Lord, but of course things would be exaggerated. Granger, but of course, a bit younger than she was now. But not much else was in the scene. Before Malfoy Manor exploded, it was vast: ballrooms for intrigue and dungeons for adventurers to try and rooms to house terrorists of the most vile nature. But this scene did not even give a good view of the walls leave alone the ultra high ceilings that weren't even there.
The first notice went to Hermione's terrified, gurgling screams. Bellatrix was singing something as insipid as it was hateful and carving into Hermione's arm. Bellatrix was not even wielding anything exotic, just a knife. And Hermione - she was not counter spelling some multidimensional trap Bella had laced with wards. There were no multipathing spell locks. No clever uses of charring spell spark scattered over a rapidly disintigrating floor. Hell, if she had to guess (and she had to because of how localized Hermione's memory was) even the windows in the walls were still intact.
This was not a battle. The only fight here was between Bellatrix' halo of jet black curls and the little girl's wild busy hair that writhed underneath her. There was no legendary matching of geniuses. This was not even the most feared terrorist to ever escape Azkaban and the brains behind the Golden Trio. The Brightest Witches of Their Ages and it was just a grown, nasty old bint torturing a child...because...because...
"Because she was a right bitch.", the grown Hermione supplied.
Selene wanted to turn to her in the memory, but it had somehow gotten tighter and even more focused. It was hard to view elements of LeStrange's fashions that weren't facing the bleeding child. The child cried and screamed and her heels beat against the floor. "At least grab her supporting arm and hip slide out.", Selene whispered. Only screams showcasing how pain and fear can keep up a rising volume while the throat they are torn from becomes increasingly hoarse. Prince fell to her knees to stare into Belatrix's mad eyes. "She was...teaching you something...", but no. All that Bellatrix's gaze held was the sheer glee of sadism and worse - the self satisfied stupidity of bigotry.
"No.", Selene wished as she backed away. But there was nowhere else to go in the memory. "This can't be it. Not the weak breaking of a thoughtless tortured victim and some psycho...abusive...monster!"
She looked to the memory's maker. Hermione shrugged. "I want out. Get me out of here. I want out!"
And it felt like she had fallen into the real world.
Hermione started speaking but was cut off before the first syllable. "I refuse to accept this!", Selene screamed.
The woman chose the exactly wrong thing to say. "I know that it's hard to watch."
Selene bore her teeth at the boss of Aurors. "You made self transfiguring communications as an extracurricular in school! You tamed the goblin's dragon into your own personal broom and had them thank you for it. You made polyjuice potion in a toilet in your second year!"
"In the lavatory. Not actually in a/"
"And Madame LeStrange! She was leading packs of aurors on casualty ridden escapades throughout the wizarding world's thoroughfares. She dueled a married pair of aurors into insanity."
"Um...you do know she was killed in a ten second duel with a house wife, right? For threatening children."
The girl came to the pensieve and flipped the table like it was a losing board game, fluid and memory spilling over the floor. "This is cow shite!"
"Alright, that's enough young lady.", Hermione snapped in one of her bossiest tones. But this time 'brilliant but scary' did not come to her aid.
The woman first noticed she was no longer looking as far down to meet the girl's gaze, and that was because the girl's feet were no longer on the floor. And then she caught a leaking of the black of the pupil under her white hair bleeding into the eye under her dark tresses. Hermione knew that something strange would happen if someone pressed Harry into a certain vengeful smile when they were young. And more than enough people told her of the fireworks of crackles that ran across her untamed tresses when she was in a mood. But Selene...
"You! You're muggleborn and didn't even wrestle her off you while she carved your flesh just to insult you? Even if she smothered your words, you didn't even Wingardium Leviousa her? Or her by that pureblood corset? Or even the knife to Accio into her back?", Selene more than spat, she accused.
Hermione's eiditic memory was racing through the DMLE's procedural scrolls on how much force accidental magic by a minor excused. Before she found her answer she pleaded. "I might be acceptable with wordless casting, but I'm shite without a wand. It's why I'm here coordinating - it's not like I was cleared for field work with flying colors."
The paper airplanes flying through the ministry started to change their courses to avoid the levitating child. "And that witch? All the fear inspired by being a genocidal general and her grand act of scare mongering is scratching a child."
"It was plenty scary at the time.", Hermione offered.
"And the storm that destroyed Malfoy Manor? What was that - coincidence?", the girl demanded.
"It still stands.", Granger countered. "Astoria and Draco don't live there because of more memories like that one."
A wale of psychic agony tore out of the child. Her head dipped. Her fingers flexed as if reaching for something to tear and settled for her own dress robe. But Hermione did spot the dip in altitude. "I won't..." Selene was shaking her head as to clear a wave of nausea but still continued to lower herself back to the floor. "I mean...I can't" The girl fell out of the air and hit a sorry mark on a desk.
Selene Prince was snoring, beginning to curl into the fetal position. Finally looking like the child she was, even if the fluid from the pensieve was beginning to find her shoes.