"A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape."
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
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When they came back together it felt like the biggest and the smallest thing in the world.
Hermione had planned and planned and organised for decades. She'd set balls rolling and woven threads together that were unaware of their own entanglement until she saw fit to reveal it, moved people into places and built and forged - and all of it for a better place.
But better places aren't utopias, and people will always be their best and worst and most magical and mundane selves and where there are people there is as much division as there is unity and as much love as there is hate.
In other words, you can give people a magical island, but they will still murder and steal and one-up each other and Hermione had never exactly planned for that.
In fact, nothing about building a society from scratch had been easy. The first robbery, the first murder. (She'd planned for some laws of course, and the island brought in more as they became necessary. That is the way of most rules, which are introduced quite some time after they are first needed.) Immigration, emigration, who was in charge?. When is a town a city, a state, a country?
When is a place more than a place?
And so Hermione had planned and forged and created, but with some decades of awareness of her own shortcomings she found she didn't have the answer to the most difficult question. How do you make a collection of disparate people, many of whom long for another place, into a society?
"I have a job for you, Tom Eldritch," she said as he let himself into his flat.
She was sitting at the table in the cottage he'd been assigned by the island's refugee coordinators. The kitchen bore signs of some use. There was a burn mark on one of the countertops and the walls already needed repainting. He'd left a mug of tea in the sink.
The table-top itself was slightly rough under her elbow, and she traced the ridges of it with her finger.
It was a lovely piece, island oak, made by a Guatemalan woodworker. He was a proficient magician and used spells of his own devising to slice through the fibres. But his work – too clean, too quick, too good – had caught attention at home and so he'd left to seek a more welcoming place for his craft. The result was this, a great heft of a piece: storied lines running through the wood. There shouldn't be oak trees old enough to turn into tables like this but well… Jairo had his own tricks for that.
All asylum seekers had to work, if they were able to, unless they joined the university, and so Iðunna was industrious enough. People like Jairo didn't stay reliant on the state for long. If they didn't have a skill they learned. But they were well-paid and well-housed and Hermione knew it wasn't enough, but she didn't know what would be.
Tom smiled as he shut the door with a theatrical flick of his new wand.
"Right on time, Archchancellor," he said, pulling off his cloak and hanging it on the hook by the door, next to where she had left her own when she'd broken into his cottage half an hour earlier.
He put his wand down on the table like a declaration and dropped into the other chair.
Hermione slid a glass of dark red wine towards him, picked up her own to toast him, and met his smile with her own as the chink of their collision rang out.
"What's the job?" he asked, after swallowing the first sip of the wine she'd brought. It was very old, and tasted like leather and dark fruit. His eyes were asking a different question, but that would have to wait.
"Tell me what you make of my island first."
He did. And after the wonder and the awe, Tom described a world she hadn't seen: looking onto the university but never being in it - a world of people who could taste home but never be there. People who'd fled because they had magic but hated it. People who loved it but felt disenfranchised by the difference in their own local magics and that practiced in Europe and the U.S..
"How do I make them believe in Iðunna?" she asked. "How do I bring everyone together without making them fear some external threat?"
He smiled again, slow and bold, his dark eyes flickering. It was like all the good times distilled into one look that said only she could ask the right question and only he would have the right answer.
That was why she'd brought him here, after all. Hermione could lead all the horses in the world to water but she'd never been able to make them believe they could drink. She'd always needed Harry for that –
But Tom; Tom could make anyone believe what he wanted. Tom could touch a place and find the exact point to break it with a blow, could look into someone's soul and find the word or the deed to bind them to him forever.
Tom could turn Iðunna the absence on a map into Iðunna the Place, the something more.
"Give them a leader," he replied. "A saviour-queen they can love and worship."
"Not that."
"Then you need to make them believe in something. Make them believe in magic until it's almost like a religion."
The truth of it washed over her. That was what she'd made this place for, after all. She believed in it, the people at the university did in their own ways – but perhaps that was not enough.
"Well then," she said, "that's your job."
"I accept."
"And," she added coyly, "I was wondering if you'd like to have dinner with me some time."
He laughed and, rising, took her hand and pulled her up and towards him in reply, closing his mouth over hers for the first time in too many years.
It was like coming home and falling up into the sky all at once, and time stood still – and she couldn't think at all she just felt and felt and her heart soared and raced and the bottom fell away from her core.
"Not tonight," he said, pulling back and tucking her hair behind her ear. "I have plans I'm afraid."
No one else had ever looked at her and seen so much.
"So do I," she murmured, and they were rushing through nothingness for a split-second and then stumbling out in the icy air.
"Where are we?" he asked, his gasp coming out in clouds of steam, before her warming spell kicked in and dissipated the worst of it.
"This was all it was," she said, "just this rock. And I grew everything out from it. Look at that."
The sun hadn't yet sank into the west, but the mountains cast a long shadow over the island. Little lights dotted here and there told a story of gathered lives, the cluster of the main town, and then smaller ones – but growing – elsewhere. How far the island had come since she'd opened its gate to the first settlers. How much further there was left in its story.
"Tell me again."
She'd told him that first night but as the sun slipped away and the moon and the stars came out, she told him again, passing the wine between them on the mountaintop that had once been a little rock battered by the Atlantic ocean.
And when she was done he pressed her against it, falling to his knees before her as he slipped her robes up, and it was familiar and new. No hands in the intervening years had played the same notes, no lips had turned her into an altar to worship at.
"I had forgotten," he said afterwards, as they gathered their clothes giddy as teenagers, "how good that felt."
"So had I. Do you remember the first time?"
"When we set the bed on fire? Hermione, of course." He pulled her close, taking her face in his hands in the moonlight, suddenly serious. "There is nothing else like this. I won't throw it away this time."
"I'll kill you, if you do," she promised, and she meant it.
Be better, she'd told him once. Well, it had taken a long, long time but now… if he was just playing a part she'd take it as long as he kept playing it forever. If he wasn't then he was becoming the man she'd always wanted him to be.
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In the end, he told them the story.
Tom Riddle was a liar and he had always loved stories – and now he spun a song of making. He gave Iðunna a mythology and wove a spell around it that didn't need any magic. He told them a story that started like this:
Once upon a time a woman left a dangerous war in a land where magic was under attack behind and set sail to follow a dream she'd had, of a rock that would turn into a refuge…
The story was told and painted and acted and carved into marble and cast into bronze. He wove the stories of other women and men and children who'd fled to the island – and at the centre of it all was magic magic magic.
The story was told on October 31st every year, when the island celebrated its founding, and in schools and at bedtime, and the more people retold it in it the stronger it became. There were other days to bring people together, too, spring festivals and the longest day and days celebrating where people had come from and nights celebrating where they were, until eventually they believed that Iðunna was more than a place. It lived inside their minds and hearts and they called themselves Iðunnians.
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Hermione Granger Dearborn stood on the terrace outside her old apartment in the university, enjoying a rare moment of peace. It was mid-July and the evening was as warm as any on the Mediterranean. Magical weather. Iðunna Town, as people had taken to calling it, had grown around the hill and now she couldn't quite see the edges of it. Everything had grown past the point she had imagined and now she had to let it.
"What are you doing hiding out here," Tom asked, sliding his hands onto her rounded stomach.
"I'm the only sober person at my own going-away party," she said although they both knew that wasn't the reason.
"Saying goodbye to your kingdom?" he breathed into her ear.
She huffed out a sigh.
"It's practically a democracy now."
He hummed in amusement, but didn't contradict her. He'd already pointed out the advantage that the newly-elected citizens' council would fall in with her wishes if she made them known, but take away much of the growing admin of running a state. She would always been the founder, he said, even if he was the only one who knew how deeply the island would listen to her, how a drop of her blood falling on its earth could send new vines winding up a tree as though they'd been fed ten years of sun and rain in an instant, or a tear call wildflowers up from the earth and into bloom.
Maternity leave was not something people in her position often took. But it had hurried in the process of early democracy.
"I'm glad really," she added. "Running things was getting rather boring. I like working out how to fix things better than being in power, as it turns out."
She thought of the new house they'd built together, in the hills just where they turned into mountains, on the edge of the part she'd decreed a nature reserve. It was far enough from anyone else that she could scream to say she wished she'd left him dead and scream because he'd done something so wonderful she felt like she'd died and no one would hear them. Far enough to lie naked on the lawn next to the stream that still remembered its chilly birth on the mountain where it pooled out into a little lake. Far enough to sing and dance and set a fire - but not so far that they'd be shut away from the world. Far enough that they might see a rare roc fly on a dusky evening or worry the child - maybe children one day - would stray past the boundary that should keep any of the most dangerous creatures away.
Hermione thought of the room she hadn't decorated yet. Sea-green, she decided, for her little island baby. A shade that would change with the light, just like the ocean. Bright at midday and deeper as the shadows crept out.
She'd have real stars painted on the ceiling and bring in the sound of the ocean to lull it to sleep. Their child wouldn't grow up like its parents, believing they were different, wrong, extraordinary, better. Her challenge would be keeping its heart full of wonder in a world where magic was normal.
"I think I'm ready to go home," Hermione told Tom. "Let's go and say goodnight."
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and... scene. Eight years of my life and we've made it. That's the end guys. Holy shit.
Review if you want an epilogue!
Thanks to Sally for this and for everything. This one is for you, Avis to my Julia (and vice versa).
On the virus: food banks are closing just as people are losing their jobs. Please give what you can. It's a terrible time and it's never been more important to be compassionate.
