Hermione Granger's P.O.V
As the Bullring market filled with patrons the air hung heavy with clatter and fatty with sweat. Hermione could hear the faint jingles of coin being passed between palms, the clank-thud of a knife striking cutting board as flanks were sliced to lamb shanks, the low hanging hum of customers weaving through the stalls talking morning matters. While industry men in suits and ties and flat-caps lingered at bakeries for a bread roll or huddled in the streets around St Martins with a shared newspaper, women in a parade of multicolours skirts laced their way to Fishmongers and butchers, where bloody aproned owners stood beside their stall and shouted offers of half-prices and buy one get one free's.
Harry stood beside her that morning, decked in her usual hard dress of thick jumper, skirt, boots and scarf, with what seemed to be some sort of flour and egg concoction topped with cheese and bacon, and Harry ate it from the wrap of newspaper the seller had handed it over in. After one such bite, she offered it out to Hermione with a satisfied grunt.
"Want some?"
Hermione's nose curled at the patches of grease and who knew what peppering the paper translucent. 1920s Britain, after all, wasn't known for its food hygiene and regulations, and Merlin knew if that was actually bacon or not some other poor small mammal.
"I'll pass, cheers."
She hedged as politely as she could, instead moving to turn conversation to other matters as the pair made their way through the market.
"So what are you going to do now that the name Harrietta Shelby has a paper-trail?"
They'd spent the morning hours and then some at the Grand Central bank, filling in documents and providing papers in return and answering a myriad of redundant questions, and it was only after the man behind the desk had spotted the sum of Harry's wealth, wealth that would be deposited in their covetous hands for safe keeping, that he'd changed from set-upon malefactor to acting like Harry was King George V's long-lost daughter. In the end he'd even offered a toast of scotch from crystal glasses at their new productive partnership.
Money, even in the past, spoke loudly and Harry, nauseatingly affluent even in their own time due to Lily and James and Sirius bequeathing all they had to her on her age of majority at 16, due to a backwards increase of inflation, was, perhaps, one of the wealthiest individuals kicking stones in England now. And she was still in woollen skirts, tatty boots, and munching greasy 'Brummie cakes' in the middle of the street.
Hermione loved her friend dearly.
"Actually-"
Harry shewed over a mouthful.
"I've got an appointment booked tomorrow to go take a gander at Aston Hall."
"Aston Hall? What do you want with that place?"
Harry came to a stop outside a sweet stall, eyeing the peanut brittle and the lollipops in pretty painted paper packaging.
"Have you heard about the reform schools here?"
Hermione cocked a curious brow at the sudden and surprising turn Harry had taken.
"They're like our juvenile detentions centres, 'Mione. Only these are all privately owned, mainly by religious groups. Catholics. Protestants. The usual suspects. I read about one in the paper last night. A boy from one was found dead a week ago. Cause of death wasn't stated, but kids don't just die. I did some digging last night, there's a pile of newspapers kept at the bookie that I pilfered through. He was the fifth one this year to have died from the same bloody school."
The bright-eyed shot of a look Hermione received after the news was sardonic and dark. Terribly, terribly dark as Harry sneered.
"And we all know what happens when you give priests unlimited access to children without being overseen by some regulatory body."
Harry quipped and Hermione's gaze took to the clear sky above, her laughter twirling up into the clouds.
"What?"
Harry barked, but it sounded more like her cockney roots wot which only succeeded in making Hermione laugh harder.
"I should have known. We've been here a total of fifty-two hours and you're already trying to dismantle the local governing authority."
Harry glared at Hermione as her chuckle died, but the look was softened by the smile etching its ghost on her face.
"Yeah, well, someone has to keep these bastards in line. I'm just enough of a wanker to do so."
Hermione pulled her handbag further up her arm as a crowd of barefoot kids came dashing passed the stall they lingered before.
"So you're going to buy Aston Hall? How does that help exactly?"
Harry finished off her Brummie cake, shoving the greasy wrapper into her pocket with a shrug.
"As a once thought of 'criminal child' as they're called in the papers, I know most of them just need a chance to do better. A place to feel safe and learn properly. Most of their crimes are petty. Pickpocketing. Shoplifting. The majority of these kids come from poor households with no other options available to them because the government keeps their boot to their neck. Some of them are orphans with no safety nets to fall back on, no family to take them in, so they get carried in by street gangs. If I get a proper school up and running, one for kids from deprived environments, then not only does it give them that chance but it'll help the local crime rate around here, and keep them out from the reform schools. If they're kept out from reform schools, then those institutions will slowly but fuckin' surely decline, and good riddance too, and bobs your uncle. Everyone's happy."
Hermione blinked in surprise.
"You've given this quite a lot of thought in only a night."
Harry grumbled, glancing away.
"I thought about opening up my own school for so-called 'troubled' kids before we… Came here. I've already applied for the licensing anyway, going to check out Aston Hall tomorrow, see if its big enough for boarding, and then I just need to petition the Council and the Birmingham educational boards, and interview potential teachers and-… I know its going to take a while, but the sooner I get a move on with it, the sooner those kids have somewhere safe to rest their noggins."
"Harrietta Shelby-"
Hermione retorted.
"Philanthropist and bleeding heart extraordinaire. I bet Umbridge is screaming bloody murder in the afterlife."
Hermione joked because she knows how delicate this is for Harry, how particularly sore it can be for the girl to be reminded of her own upbringing and mentioning her plans was an open invitation for scrutinizing her motive, and because, fucking hell, Harry was good with kids. She always had been. She'd spend hours in Gryffindor tower looking after the first years, tucking them in at night and making sure they had all their books in the morning for lessons even when she forgot her own. Spent weekends in the library with Hermione ignoring her own homework in favour of helping those in the year below her.
Harry was bloody great with kids, and that goodness came from a childhood of having no one be good to her. So Hermione jokes to break the tension, the terrible hold that both their past still have on them, and Harry takes the invisible hand out, shrugging.
"Nothing's set in stone yet. I still need to talk to Tommy about being my beard."
"Beard?"
Hermione asked as Harry nodded.
"I need a man's name and face to my proposals that the Birmingham Council and Boards will take more seriously than a sixteen-year-old girl. You heard the bank man when we walked in. He called me sweetheart and asked where my father was and if I knew how to sign my own fuckin' name."
Hermione chuckled.
"I was so sure you were going to deck him from across the table when he said that."
"I nearly fuckin' did. So, yeah, I need to speak to Tommy first. Then I need to buy Aston Hall or some other place big enough, if not I need land to build on, and of course, I need you to agree to be my Headmistress when I finally get to that stage."
"Me?"
Hermione squawked.
"Headmistress?"
Harry frowned at her, seemingly perplexed at Hermione's own confusion.
"Who else would I bloody trust enough with this?"
That was, perhaps, as close as a compliment as Harry got to dishing out these days.
"Why me?"
Harry waved her off.
"Why you? Do you really have to ask that? Before everything… Kicked off at our old school-"
Kicked off, Hermione thought, was perhaps the polite way of saying war breaking out.
"You were the only one keeping me and Ron from expulsion every week or getting killed due to our own stupidity. Plus-"
Harry shrugged.
"I sort of saw your application for being a teacher in training under McGonagall that you hid in your kitchen drawer before we… Left. Headmistress seems to be a better agreement than teacher's aide."
"Harry! That was private!"
"Well you should have hidden it better then, eh?"
"You bloody pig-headed pygmy puff."
There's no real bite to Hermione's insult, both girls were smiling, and the air was less heavy now, dusted with sunshine and with the smell of peanut brittle.
"I want a salary increase."
"We haven't even got a building yet, Hermione."
"Think of it as a down payment for me having to put up with you. I'm going to need plenty of whisky, and that doesn't come cheap."
Harry grinned, her dimples on full show. It had been a long while since Hermione had seen that smile. A real one. Too long.
"Deal."
"Excuse me?"
The voice came from the side, barking out from behind the stall from the face of a sullen man glaring at the two girls standing at the side of his stand.
"Are you going to stand there all day nattering or are you going to bloody buy something?"
Harry glanced down to the confections, shoving her hand into her skirt pockets.
"I'll take it."
The man rolled his eyes.
"It? The peanut brittle? It's half a crown for six-"
"All of it."
The man blinked at her, sluggishly repeating her words.
"All… of… it?"
He came back to himself, shaking his head.
"I ain't got no time for little girls who-"
Harry dumped a healthy load of paper notes on top of the stand.
"All of it. The lollipops and the nougat too. All of it… Apart from the lemon sherbets. You can fuckin' keep those. That should cover it, right?"
It would cover it. More than cover it. The man knew that too, and after a moment of spluttering and stuttering, he nodded, reaching below the stall to pull out paper bags, rushing to begin packing up the goods on his table after snatching the notes up to shove into his apron pouch.
"Anything else I can get you, Miss?"
See the power of money, Hermione thought. It could turn little girls into Miss's with a capital M.
Harry shook her head, and Hermione tutted.
"Any reason we're going to have to try and cart all these bags back to your car?"
Harry grinned over at her, and there they were again. Those dimples. Any reservations Hermione might have had about coming back nearly a century into the past dissipated if only because she got to see her friend smile truly once more.
"I have an Uncle John who has four kids. He called me pipsqueak this morning. I'm going to see how well he can say that again after dealing with sugar-rushed children for a few hours. And I can send a bit of it over to Karl in London. The brittle might be a bit too much for his gums, but he'll get along fine with the chocolate and fudge."
Harry doesn't say that this is also because she had missed those kids birthdays and Christmas's, had missed most milestones and moments that made a family a family, that she was now, likely, trying to make up for it the only way she could. All at once and trying to give them things she didn't have at their age. No, Hermione thought. Harry would never say that, as she won't say she wants to help those reform kids because she never got the help she had desperately needed once upon a time, but Hermione knew it all the same.
Her friend really was a bleeding fucking pushover heart behind that sarcastic, tart-sharp tongue of hers, and although Harry had always had trouble verbalizing her love or emotions, they were pretty evident through her actions. In the languages of Love Harry was very predominately in the Acts of Service and Gift-Giving camp.
Those kids were going to be pampered rotten.
Perhaps it was best Hermione did take the Headmistress spot when the time came if it did. Circe only knew how spoilt Harry would get a whole building full of children in a month if left to her own devices. Colin Creedy needed only blink up at her with those big eyes of his and Harry had spent hours in the afternoon being posed around the school for his photographs without a single complaint from the black-haired tyrant who had similarly cussed out and fist-fought Lucas Johnson, a Gryffindor boy two years older at the time, for asking a first year to pass the bloody gravy without saying please.
That had been one of many near expulsions Hermione had somehow defused before a teacher could get involved.
"Now come on-"
Harry said as she took two bags from the man behind the stall, unceremoniously shoving them at Hermione to grab. Settled in her arms, she felt the weightless charm Harry had sneakily placed on them resolve an easy trip back to the car as the darker haired girl took another three from the stall owner now void of treats and sweets.
"Let's get a move on."
Harrietta Shelby's P.O.V
Harry flicked the butt of her smoke out the rolled down window of the cab, touching down on the seat beside her hip to the dented card box and pulling another free to roll over her bottom lip before striking match to light it up again. This was her six cigarette since they had parked the car.
"You just going to sit there chain smoking all day?"
Harry took a long, long drag at the voice of her friend sitting in the passenger seat.
"We sure this is the place?"
The road was narrow, unpatched but with mud and clay, lined with dingy bricked back-to-back houses. The lamppost on the side walk had its glass dome smashed in. Broken. A woman from a few houses down careened out a top window, tossing a pot of suspiciously yellow liquid out the window and into the street where it sat in a sad, yellow puddle in a sad, brown street.
"84 Watery Lane. See it? It's the house just four down on the left. This is where the census says an Elizabeth Stark lives, or, at least, she did last year."
Harry thrummed her thumb on the end of her smoke, uncaring of the flaring tip and the ash being carried away in the light breeze. A nervous tick.
"I know it's not exactly a pretty street, Harry-"
"I don't care if it's bloody pretty or not."
Harry barked back, perhaps more harshly than warranted. Yet, it was the truth. If Elizabeth Stark lived in a mud hut or a fuckin' ant hill, Harry wouldn't have given two shits. She only cared that the only light in the street was broken, that there was no proper road to walk safely on, that a group of men with factory soot still staining there hands leered from the other side of the slender path.
Did Elizabeth have to walk home in the dark? Did she have good enough shoes for the mud here? Did the men leer at her like that?
Harry threw the half-smoked cigarette out, and rolled up her window, steeling her spine.
"Keep the doors locked and windows up. I should be back soon. I just… want to see her."
"You sure you don't want me to come with you?"
Did she? No, Harry thought. She wanted to do this alone. She needed to do this alone. Somethings… somethings a person had to see through by themselves. Like walking to her death, Harry needed to see the end of this road with her own ghosts.
So she smiled at Hermione, and she was sure it came out more a grimace, more apologetic, but the returned smile, soft and small, told Harry the curly haired witch understood.
Slamming the door shut behind her, hearing the click of a locking spell Hermione had inconspicuously shot off inside the cab, Harry made the short walk up the road, passed the men who whistled, and came to a stop in front of a singular stone step before a door with a wonkily painted 84 on its face.
She didn't knock immediately. Harry told herself to. Pictured herself raising her hand and knocking in the same way she did everywhere else, eight sharp wraps for the eighth Horcrux, as if her disordered compulsions had a humour all of its own, and yet she just stood there before the door. She felt… Small then. Incredibly, terribly small. As if she was that child again, with Hagrid leaning over her with a storm raging outside, flashing its anger in thunder and lightning, telling her she was going to Hogwarts, that magic lay just a train ride away.
And like that bruised child, she feared she was going to wake up any moment back underneath the stairs and realize it was all but a fuckin' dream.
What was behind that door with the chipped and wonky numbers? A woman with good shoes? The woman from the photograph in her pocket? A woman who had signed her name as Always yours? Or something else?
Sixteen years was a long fuckin' time.
Harry had already lucked out with Tommy, and Merlin knew her good fortune had never run very far at all.
Maybe Elizabeth Stark had moved on. Maybe that was why Tommy Shelby said soon. Maybe Elizabeth Stark already knew she was here and she wanted nothing to do with Harry, and Tommy was just trying to ease the blow. Maybe she had another husband and another kid, a better one than Harry could ever hope to be, a kid that could smile more and laugh freely, who didn't lose their fuckin' mind when something flashed green and-
Harry shook her head violently, tugged on her skirt, and lifted her fist.
Best to pull the dagger out now-
The door swung open before she could knock. A man came tumbling out, startled when he saw Harry there, prancing back a step, face smeared with factory soot and shirt untucked and-
Buckling up his trousers.
He, like his friends down the road, leered.
"Ah, you didn't tell me you had more girls on offer, Lizzie. Thought just you and Margaret worked here now that Ethel's been copped? Trying to keep that coin to yourself, aye?"
Harry blinked, confused, baffled, taking a rather large step backwards as the man lurched forward.
His grin fell.
"Nah. Spent my wages already. I'll see you next time though, little bit."
He snorted through his nose and spat at their side, and away he stumbled down the road. Harry frowned, about to give chase, give a piece of her fuckin' mind and maybe a broken bone along with it, when she spotted the open door.
Open but not empty.
A woman stood on the threshold, tall, willowy. She was pale skinned underneath the light make-up she wore, nothing but a bit of kohl around the eye and a stain of red lipstick on her lip-
Lip and cheek, as if it had been smeared in a rush. The dress sat funnily on her tall frame, ill-fitting and half dangling off her shoulder, half unbuttoned. One of her stockings was rolled down her leg to hang curled at a slim ankle, and the dark curls on her head had fallen from there pins, frizzy as if someone had grabbed her by the hair at some point.
She looked like she'd just-
Oh.
Smeared lipstick. Half buttoned dress. The man buckling his trousers.
Trying to keep the coin for yourself, aye?
Oh.
"I-… Uh-… My name's-"
The woman blinked at her, green eyes, not quite as bright as Tommy's, the only thing to move, the only thing to widen, the only thing to spark.
"No."
Harry stumbled a little, skidded in the mud as if she'd been pushed. The voice was rough, dark like crushed velvet, crumpled like it too, and Harry saw the woman's hand on the door frame, saw how white her knuckles were, how close she was from tearing off a finger nail if she didn't loosen her grip.
"No."
She said harsher this time, louder, recoiling from Harry in the street and back into the dark hallway behind the door.
"Leave."
"Please-"
Harry tried, taking a step forward, suddenly desperate and suddenly tongue tied, but the woman slammed the door with one last parting shout.
"Fuckin' leave!"
By the time Harry got to the door, she heard the lock turn. Unexpectedly, she found she could knock after all, and she did, loudly, incessantly.
"Please!"
She shouted through the wood, perhaps as crumpled as her mother had just moments ago, voice catching in her throat and coming out between her teeth like broken mirror shards.
"Please-"
Please let me just explain. Please let me say I don't care. Please let me in. Please tell me you still want me.
The lock didn't turn. The door didn't open.
Harry's forehead thumped against the wonky numbers as she gave one last pathetic knock of knuckle. She doesn't know how long she stayed like that for, face against the door, fist clenched and raised but no longer moving.
"Please."
It was barely a whisper. Barely a prayer. Barely got anything in return but the creak of her weight against the door.
Harry heaved away from the house and bolted back for the car. When she threw the door open, slipped in, and scrambled to turn on the ignition, Hermione was sitting straight up and staring at her worriedly.
"Shite… Are you crying, Harry?!"
Harry fumbled with the key, dropped it, cursed, picked it up and finally got the engine rolling before she harshly and determinedly scrubbed a hard hand over her face. It came away soaked. Fuck. She was crying. Sobbing. Breath catching in her chest.
"I'm fine. Fine. Got to-… Uh, got to get that chocolate in the boot back to the kids before it melts. No time to waste."
"Harry, love, take a moment-"
Harry sucked in her breath, held it in her lungs until she thought it might burn scars into her ribs, but it did the trick, got her tears stopping, got her breathing back. It didn't, however, stop the violent shaking in her hands when they wrestled for grip on the steering wheel.
Petunia had taught her how important it was to stop crying quickly or else.
"I'm fine."
She said as she pulled the car out into the road.
"We have a dinner to make and I told you I'd be back soon. Honestly, Hermione, I'm fine."
I must not tell lies. What a load of bullshit that was. It seemed to be the only thing Harry ever fuckin' did.
The car peeled down the road.
It has always been and will always be my strongest head cannon that Harry's greatest weakness is children. I know in the epilogue they made him an Auror, for obvious reasons I suppose, but for myself I always thought he would have taken a large step back from all the fighting he'd endured as a literal child, and should have gotten into teaching or social work that helped kids that were in similar situations as him as a youngster. Seen as this is fanfiction, I can bring that alive here.
Alfie makes another appearance next chapter, so I hope you are all looking forward to that.
Thank you to everybody who has favourited, followed and reviewed. If you have the time, drop a review, they're the fuel to my mad muses. 😉