Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, Hogwarts, Gringotts, the Leaky Cauldron or anything else in JKR's wonderful world. Except for the little pebble just to left of the front doors of Hogwarts. I put that there. I might own that. Maybe. But probably not.
A/N: Final chapter to a little story that just popped into my head. Something I forgot was to say this story is AU. Concolor44, after your so enthusiastic reviews I really hope you're not disappointed in how this turns out.
Reunion
His thoughts were interrupted as someone attempted to sit down beside him, bumping into his hip. "Budge over, you." A pleasant voice demanded.
He was a gentleman, but it was just plain rude the way the woman was behaving, and he turned to look at her and say so…only to stop in surprised amazement.
"You!"
"Yes, me." The silver blonde haired supermodel from Stonehenge said in reply as she once more bumped into his hip. "Now, move over."
Without thinking he slid across the seat even as he noticed the brunette sliding into the seat of the booth on the other side of the table.
"Don't mind her." She stated with a smile. "She practices being a bitch in front of a mirror every morning."
"Who's practicing?" the blonde replied in a deadpan voice. "I am a bitch before breakfast."
He looked between the two of them in shock before he found his voice. "You did it! Where's Lacey? What have you done with her? Tell me where she is! What did you do to her? Why did you take…"
The brunette flicked her finger at him …and he went silent. His mouth still moved, he could feel his lips and tongue making the required shapes for speech, his breath still moved through his throat, but there was no sound. He put his hand to his throat and tried to speak and could feel a vibration under his fingers, but somewhere between there and his lips the sound just seemed to vanish.
Who were these people? He wondered as he stared at the two of them. How could they do the things they did?
"Now, Brian." The brunette said quietly. "If you calm yourself and settle down, I'll let you speak again. My name is Hermione, and she is Daphne," she pointed at the blonde beside him, "and Lacey is fine. We had to take her and the others with us when we left because of some unforeseen side-effects of our ritual, but she is safe, unhurt and in good spirits. She knows why she can't come home right now and agrees with our reasoning."
He sat quietly, looking at her for a few moments before pointing at his mouth. A flick of a finger once again and he said, "What kind of side-effects?" Pleased he hadn't stumbled as he spoke, he glared at her.
It was the blonde, Daphne, who replied, however. "She blew up her room when one of our servants popped in on her unexpectedly."
He looked at her, dumbfounded. "Lacey doesn't know anything about explosives!" he burst out.
"All four walls." She continued as if he hadn't said anything. "Although the outside wall was reinforced by the exterior stonework so only the window was actually blown out. Destroyed the interior wall, however, and damaged the floor and ceiling." She shrugged. "Not to mention damaging or destroying everything in the room."
He didn't believe her. "How?" he demanded.
The brunette, Hermione, stretched her arm, sleeve of her shirt pushed above her elbow, across the table. "To be able to answer that, I need to show you something first, alright?" He nodded. "Good. Now, I want you to examine my hand and arm. Make certain there is nothing attached to it or hidden by it."
With only a small bit of hesitation he encircled her upper forearm at the elbow with the fingers of both hands and drew them downward to her hand which he pressed between the palms of his hands. He found nothing.
She nodded. "Good. Now hold my hand so you know I can't pick anything up with it and crumple your napkin up in a ball." He did so. "Now, when I tell you to, put the napkin in my hand and don't look at anything else."
Some kind of trick, he thought, sleight of hand. He kept a watch out of the corner of his eyes for something to happen when he wasn't looking as she nodded. He put the paper ball into the palm of her upturned hand, her fingers closed around it and barely two second later reopened.
He gaped at what lay there now instead of the napkin. "Is that a …?"
"A diamond? Yes." She replied as she handed it to him.
"Showoff." The blonde, Daphne, murmured, not impolitely.
Showoff indeed. A traditional round cut stone, it sparkled in a ray of sunshine coming through the window. It was also blood red and as big as a table tennis ball.
"If you want to watch someone's head explode, find a reputable dealer and have them appraise it." Hermione said. "Just be ready for a whole lot of questions you can't answer, such as "Where was it mined? Where was it cut? Who cut it? How did you get it into the country?" and most importantly of all, "Did you pay import taxes on it?"
He broke off his examination of the stone to look at her. "Why?"
"Because that is a red diamond, one of the rarest stones on the planet and the record holder for size is a little over five carats and worth millions. I guarantee that one is quite a bit bigger than that. Literally priceless. The finding of a rock that size would have been on the news around the world the day it was found."
Daphne suddenly reached out and touched the diamond with the tip of her finger. "Finite." She intoned. He watched in fascination as the hard and heavy diamond turned back into light, white paper napkin. He looked between the two of them. "How?"
Hermione leaned back against her seat. "Magic." She pointed at the napkin as he stared at her. "That," she stated, "was what is called transfiguration, the changing of one thing into another. In this case, very easily as the two things are basically the same thing in two different forms."
That seemed to surprise Daphne. "Really? But they're paper and diamond. How are they the same thing?"
"They're both made of carbon." Her companion answered. "The paper loosely and the diamond compacted very tightly by heavy pressure and heat."
"I'm going to have to look at those chemistry books you told me about." the blonde replied.
The brunette nodded and turned her attention back to Brian. "We are witches, true magic using, potion brewing, broom riding…"
Daphne snorted mirthfully. "You hate getting more than six inches off the ground."
Hermione glared at her for a moment. "… witches. Men like us are called wizards."
Brian could see where this was going. "Your ritual, you turned Lacey into a witch, didn't you?"
"Umm, no." she answered. "Not exactly."
"But then what were you there for? What did you hope to accomplish?" he questioned. "To grow trees and plants; heal people; clean up the pollution? What? And what do you mean, not exactly?"
"All of those things you mentioned? Remember those 'unforeseen side-effects'?"
"You did all of that accidentally?" He couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Didn't you read the instruction book on how to use the thing? And what were you trying to do?"
"There are no instructions on how to use Stonehenge. Nobody knows how to use it anymore." Explained Hermione. "That's why it's illegal to use it for anything. The chances of making really big mistakes are just too great. But we were desperate."
"And we were trying to heal and save our husband." Daphne said from beside him.
His gaze flicked back and forth between the two of them, wondering what questions to ask first. "If you were trying to heal your husband… wait, husband, singular, for the two of you?"
"It's complicated." Daphne said with a waving off motion of her hand. "But it's legal in our society under certain circumstances."
"Oookaaayyy." He replied, wondering what circumstances those might be. "If Stonehenge is a magical tool of some kind, why don't any of you know how to use it without a boatload of 'unforeseen side-effects' screwing up half the country and turning my girlfriend into a witch?"
"Because the people who built it didn't have a written language. Any instructions for using it were passed down from father to son or master to apprentice or priest to acolyte orally and memorizing it. They did this for thousands of years. Things were bound to get lost, forgotten." Hermione explained. "The last people who knew anything about how to use the henge were the Druids and between the Romans and the early Christians, they were wiped out. There were bits and pieces out there, but without the religious leaders, those who knew any of those bits didn't know how to use them, so they didn't feel it was necessary to remember them or pass them on. When they died, the knowledge died with them."
"But you knew enough to repair the entire circle and do your ritual." He pointed out. "Even if you did have a lot of 'unforeseen side-effects'."
"Repairing the site was easy." The brunette stated. "With the power available there returning it to a functioning circle was no problem at all."
"Power?" he asked. "What power?"
"Stonehenge is unique in all the world." She explained. "It sits on a crossing site of three ley lines." She saw his confused look. "Think of them as rivers of magical power that can be tapped for use. There are many places where two will cross, but only two places where you will find three crossing. However, the other is in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, which sort of makes it unsuitable for our needs."
Yeah, he could understand that. A bit wet to try anything there. "So, what happened? Did you intend for everything to happen that did?"
She sighed. "No. Once we connected to the ley lines…"
"That white flash!" He exclaimed. "The one that burned off all your clothes. Why weren't the two of you roasted? Or at least burned?"
She shrugged. "Magic." She replied as if it was the only answer she had, while from beside him he heard Daphne mumble, "I really liked those boots."
Hermione continued on. "Anyway, we used a simple repairing spell intended to fix the henge so we could use it to heal our husband but were unprepared for the amount of power released when we cast it." He raised his eyebrow in surprise. "You've heard the old saying 'using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito'?" he nodded. "Well, essentially, we used a nuclear bomb."
He goggled open mouthed at her, gobsmacked at her admission. "Didn't you realize what was going to happen? Three of these magic rivers and you didn't think about what you might be causing with that kind of power?" He accused darkly.
"Yes, we did." The blonde, Daphne, growled at him, obviously perturbed at his accusing tone. "We spent weeks going over our research about Stonehenge, examining every little scrap of information we could find about how to use it, control it. According to everything we knew, our ritual shouldn't have affected everything like it did."
"But you missed something. You missed something and now Lacey is a witch and you've got people going crazy trying to replicate your 'unforeseen side-effects'."
"We didn't miss anything." Hermione said, drawing his attention back to her. "We never had it to miss in the first place."
He scowled her. "Pure semantics."
She nodded back at him. "Probably, but true, nonetheless. Like I said, between the Romans and early Christians the old ways, the religions, were wiped out. The Christians were deliberately trying to wipe out anything challenging their beliefs, like the old pagan religions, but the Romans were more of a 'do what you want as long as you don't try to fight the Empire' way of thinking. Unfortunately, the people living here had a more 'you're in my front yard, we're going to fight' way of thinking. One of those Romans though was an ancestor of our husband, and he had a habit of trying to talk to the locals, especially anybody involved with the various religions. He took a lot of notes and most of them survived till today. However, if the old religions were a very large book, he only managed to get various miscellaneous pages, hence, our lack of knowledge about what was going to happen when we did our ritual."
Okay. He could see their reasoning. If you're taking a shot in the dark with your best knowledge, there was a real good chance you were going to miss something you had no idea you needed. "Why were you so desperate to heal you husband that you even took a chance on using Stonehenge?"
"Do you remember the late '90's when all of the murders were taking place around the country? Terrorists and cults were blamed."
Oh yeah! He remembered those. One of the least gory where the details had been released in the face of cries of a coverup was about a nine-year-old girl who'd been gang raped in her own home, in front of her bound parents, before being sliced open from crotch to throat and her parents strangled. After that, when the authorities stated there would be no details released, people turned green and nodded in understanding.
"We were fighting the people responsible for all of that. They had taken over the magical government and … disposing of people they thought didn't belong in their little utopia. Think Nazi death camps with a lot more enjoyment of what they were doing, and you won't be too far wrong."
He felt a little nauseous and tried not to think about that. "You beat them?" he asked, hoping so.
She nodded back at him. "Yes. Our husband killed their leader, and if there is a Purgatory, he's in it because Satan won't let him into Hell for fear he might take over."
He gulped. "That bad?"
"Worse." Daphne said from beside him. "Look up 'Evil Incarnate' and all you'll find is his picture."
"But, what happened? That was years ago. Did you wait all this time to heal your husband or something?"
Hermione shook her head. "No. We were doing fine, living our lives. But we hadn't gotten all of the Dark Lord's followers. They had decided they liked being in power, so they regrouped, recruited new followers despite all we had done and last year they staged a coup. They massacred ninety percent of those who opposed their ideas in our government and took over. They killed a lot of our friends…"
"Family." Came a cold comment from the woman sitting beside him and he shivered.
"But they miscalculated where our husband would be." Hermione went on. "The group that appeared to kill my parents and little sister were very surprised to find him there as well. So surprised in fact that one of them hit him with a curse that took so much magical power to cast, he dropped dead from the effort. Fortunately, he wasn't powerful enough to complete the spell and it only started slowly killing our husband instead of killing him instantly." She shrugged. "So, we grabbed him and my family and ran to a safe place to figure out what we needed to do and how to do it, to find out what had happened."
"This curse," he asked, "I'm assuming it was bad?"
"It was eating his magic." Daphne replied. "He is one of the most powerful wizards known, but we couldn't stop it or treat it. He had a lot of power so he had longer while we tried everything we could think of, but we couldn't stop it. We finally gave him a Draught of Living Death and hit him with a stasis charm to keep it from advancing while we tried to figure out what to do."
"Huh? Draught…?"
"Suspended animation." Hermione supplied with a smile, understanding his confusion.
"Oh." He looked at her quizzically. "You can do that?" Her smile just widened, and he felt silly at even asking the question. If they did it, of course they had it. "Okay, your man is alive but no use in a fight. I'm thinking you started looking for a cure?"
"Oh, we knew what the cure was, the problem was, it took more power than what we had to cast it." She explained. "It took more power than what Harry had and he's the most powerful wizard in Europe."
He nodded in understanding. "That's when you thought of Stonehenge."
She shook her head. "Not at first, no." she stated. "But when we started looking at all the other sites we could use we found them all guarded against our using them."
"Wow! He must be one scary dude!"
"These two were the demons that haunted their nightmares." Daphne said, indicating Hermione. "The Bogeymen hiding under their beds. The bastards knew as long as they were alive, death could come at any time."
He looked at the expression on her face and a shiver went down his spine. He turned back to Hermione. "So, what happened?"
"We came across the ancestor's notes. Some of them talked about the Great Circle on the Plain. One of them even mentioned a ritual for healing. We checked and it wasn't guarded, probably because of the prohibition against using it, the fact nobody knew how to use it, and the numbers of non-magical people that were always around it, especially on those days when we would need to use it."
An idea occurred to him. "The Equinox, a ritual of renewal, rebirth."
She nodded. "A time of Healing of the Earth."
"So. It was a choice of last resort." She nodded. "But where was he?" he asked, puzzled. "Wouldn't he need to be there for the ritual to work?"
"Oh, we buried him right under our feet a few days before the equinox when nobody was looking." Daphne glibly stated.
He stared at her in shock. "Alive? You buried your husband alive?"
"Suspended animation, Brian." Hermione reminded him gently.
That brought him up. "Oh. Sorry." Yeah, right. Being buried wouldn't bother him at all in that state. Except for maybe the worms and bugs and little critters. But they'd have thought of all that and put him in a container of some sort …right?
"So…since you're here now, I'm going to take a wild guess and say your magic ritual worked, you got your husband back, you beat the bad guys, and everything is going to be alright… right?" He certainly hoped he was right.
"Oh yes!" Came a soft, sensuous purr from his right. "We beat the bad guys." She said, obviously remembering something. "They'll never get a third chance to try that again."
He looked into her ice blue eyes and the shiver that had gone down his spine earlier turned into a full body shake. Those beautiful orbs glinted, as if made of the very substance they looked like. But it was her smile that terrified him, caused that shaking. He didn't even want to guess what had happened, what she had done to have a memory that would put a smile like that on a face like hers. Family she had said. He knew right then he never, ever, wanted to be on her bad side.
"Yes, our husband is now very reluctantly sitting on the throne of Magical England while we try to put things back together." Hermione said, giving him the strength to tear his gaze from the blonde's own terrifying one. "Which finally brings us to Lacey and the others."
He nodded, giving one last glance at Daphne before turning away. "Yeah, there were fourteen of them."
"Three hundred and fifty-two."
He stared at her, again. "No, there were only…"
"Only fourteen there at the circle." She told him patiently. "But within the area of effect there were another three hundred and thirty-eight."
He blinked trying to process the information. Finally, "What happened? Why only them? Why not everybody there?"
She pointed at the napkin that had been a diamond. "A year ago, neither one of us would have been able to do what we did with that without a wand. The ritual boosted our power. We're now where Harry used to be, or even higher, and he's so high, if there's anyone on the planet more powerful, they have to be a god."
"But Lacey isn't like you. She wasn't a witch. She didn't have magic. What happened to her?"
"Yes, she did." She told him. "Lacey and all of the others were what we call squibs, people with magic but at such low power levels they don't know it's there, much less be able to use it. The ritual affected them like it affected us, it boosted those levels to where they can use magic now. Lacey is now a very powerful witch, a witch who needs training. The others all depend on how far away from the circle they were as to how powerful they are now."
"Can't she just not use it?" If she had magic, would she need him anymore?
She gave him a sympathetic smile. "Can you not use your hands, your feet? It's a part of her now and always will be. When you're aware of your magic, it sings to you, comforts you."
"She said Stonehenge was singing." He said wistfully, remembering that night. "She looked so happy when she said it, before she went back in."
Hermione smile slightly and nodded. "There's something else. Remember we told you she blew up her room?"
He nodded. "That was magic?"
"Accidental magic. Uncontrolled magic that reacts to high emotional states, or outside stimulations such as startlement or fear. Children usually outgrow it by the time they're eleven and go to school." She suddenly grinned. "I drove my parents spare a few times because of it. Now we have several hundred adults experiencing it and don't know what's going on or what to do about it. They all have to be trained as well."
"So, she's dangerous?"
She shook her head. "No, not really. But like I said, she needs to be trained to be able to control it."
He sat back on his bench and looked at her as he thought about what she had told him. Lacey was going to have to stay with them, for who knew how long. He felt a pang. She was going to learn new things, without him. She was going to do and see new things, without him. She was going to meet new people, without him. She had been such a big part of his life for so long, the very thought of her not being a part of it…hurt, so very, very badly.
"So," he said sadly. "What are you going to do about the Stonehenge Event?"
"Nothing." Daphne stated simply.
His head snapped around to stare at her. "Nothing?" he asked incredibly, unable to believe her answer. "But what about what happened? All the things that changed? How are you going to explain all that away?"
"We're not." Hermione said. "We're going to ignore it."
He couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Ignore it? How can you do that with something that had such a wide-ranging effect? It's worldwide news!"
"The same way we ignore the Bermuda Triangle and UFO's." She gave him a sympathetic smile. "Brian, we cannot try to explain what happened or what we did for a lot of reasons, not the least of which would be the welfare and safety of all the magical people out there. There are mysteries big and small all over the world that people have no answer for, no explanation. Scientists have been examining them for years, decades, centuries, with no more understanding of them now than when they started. This is just going to be another one. We'll let them look and experiment and examine all they want while we stay away from them. But eventually, when they can't find anything, when it doesn't happen again, people will simply forget about it as nothing but a fluke except for a few who will make it their life's work to keep looking."
"Well, what about me?" he demanded heatedly. "Why didn't you stay away from me, huh? Why come find me and tell me all of these things just to tell me I can't even see the woman I'm just now realizing I love?"
"Because ya big doofus, I told them if they didn't ya'd probably do something incredibly stupid."
He snapped up straight in his seat, looking for the voice. "Lacey?"
And then, she was there. At least, her face was, floating in the air beside Hermione with a great big grin and mischievous twinkling eyes. "Yar girlfriend? Ya love me? When were ya going to tell me all that, ya doof?"
"Lace! Oh God, Lacey!" He didn't care about the tears running down his cheeks or the big goofy grin he had as he reached across the table towards her. Her head appeared, then a slice down her front widening as whatever she had over her hiding her slid away. She reached out and took his hands. "Lacey!"
She laughed. "Ya already said that! Try something else."
He did. "I love you! Will you marry me?"
"There might be a little problem with that." Came a wry comment from beside him.
He looked at the woman to see a smirk on her face. "Why? What's wrong?"
"Have you really looked at her Brian?" Hermione asked.
"Yeah! I don't see anything …"
But he did. This was no twenty-five-year-old woman. The maturity he was used to seeing in her face wasn't there anymore. Sitting on the seat he could tell she was shorter than him when they'd always been about evenly matched. Her breasts were noticeably smaller. If he had to guess she looked like she was fourteen, maybe fifteen. "Lacey, what's going on? What happened?"
She shook his hands while grinning wildly. "The Event, ya silly git." She laughed in answer.
He looked at Hermione, confusion evident all over his face. "We figure she was regressed ten or eleven years." She answered. "Of the other thirteen, we've got an eighty-two-year-old grandma who looks like a twenty something supermodel, a fifty-year-old man who keeps bitching about having to go through puberty again, and a thirty-five-year-old mother who looks thirty-five." As he raised an eyebrow in question at that one, she shrugged. "Who knows? Some more of those 'unforeseen side-effects'. Magic does as magic wills and in this case, we've got a wide range of age regression with no rhyme or reason as to why some regressed so much while others barely at all. Another reason we can't let them go home yet. Rather hard to explain a grandmother who looks decades younger than her children."
Lacey shook his hands again to get his attention. "Another three or four years and then ya better ask me again, ya prat!" She suddenly released his hands, stood up and leaned over the table, grabbed him by the ears and pulled his face into hers for a sound snog. As they finished, she backed away with a big grin, while still holding his ears. "Ya made me wait far to long for that Brian Denley."
He grinned. "I'm sorry Lace. You were always just Lacey, my best friend. What's that old song? You don't know what you've got till it's gone! I didn't know what I had until you weren't there, and it hurt so much." He put his hand out and cupped her cheek. "I'm not going to wait three or four years; I'm going to ask you every day until you say yes."
Her smile widened. "Yes!" He pulled her into another kiss.
"Oh, yuck! Do we look that sappy when we snog Harry?"
"I certainly don't but I don't know about you."
"That's because I can do it and make it look classy and sophisticated."
"Suuurrree you can! Keep telling yourself that."
((((((OOOOO))))))
Brian stepped out of shop to begin his walk home, his heart lighter than it had been in six months. Lacey was fine and starting a new life, a life he would be a part of. They could start writing one another and they would be able to visit from time to time. Who cared he would have to wait a few years to get married before it wouldn't look like he was cradle robbing? She was worth it. She was as in love with him as he was with her, only she'd known for a much longer time. She always had been smarter than him about things like that.
You don't know what you've got till it's gone!
So true, but he'd gotten it back and he was never letting go!
A/N: So ends the Stonehenge Event. Just another little Potterverse I've created that I may come back to in time. Hope you liked the story. Something a little different. Now it's back to House. I really want to work on that some more. Hearty thanks to all of those with best wishes for my Covid and it seems to be working. Still a hacking cough but no worse. Look to those you love and hold them close as you tell them so. TA! ER