Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
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At eleven o'clock in the morning, having toured the rose gardens, Hermione is drinking tea out of the most elegant cup she has ever seen. Likely the tea set, with its crest of serpents, would qualify as a museum piece both for age and rarity. She savors the light taste of the tea as she looks out at the sunlit gardens of Malfoy Manor.
Her father and Narcissa have not stopped talking, and he's jotting a list of books and periodicals that she absolutely must read.
Her mother has inquired as to what sorts of toys the wizarding world provides for its children, and Draco has vanished into the deeper reaches of the house to fetch his own collection. As expected, it's quite extensive: there is the toy broom, the miniature Potions kit, the animated creatures, including at least seven figurines of dragons, representing the major species of the British Isles and Scandinavia. Hypatia loves them, but has to be restrained from attempting to stuff them into her mouth (well, some things are universal). There's also a full set of walking and flying Quidditch figurines, representing some of the major international teams, and a wizarding chess set of Persian make that's been in the family for over seven hundred years.
Narcissa looks over and smiles at her son with his playthings, although Hermione notices something very sad about the expression; no doubt she's remembering happier days… well, which would not have been happy days at all to certain segments of the population (herself included).
The gardens are beautiful, flourishing and serene under a perfect summer sky. The paradox of this place is that it's gracious and well-proportioned, but terrible things have happened here. She looks out over the terrace from which one can view the gardens: Narcissa's rose garden, where white blooms glow among the green, and beyond that the mazes and fountains of the formal gardens.
From here, she can see the path they traversed earlier in the morning: her father and mother in their best walking clothes and sensible shoes (elegance balanced against practicality, with the latter breaking the tie); Narcissa in her gardener's robes and broad-brimmed hat; Draco carrying Hypatia (who is wearing a sun-bonnet of decidedly Muggle cut); and Neville, looking rather surprisingly like the wizarding notion of a country gentleman. Of the lot of them, it's still Neville who surprises her the most, perhaps because he was so shy and awkward when he was young, but now knows exactly the right note to sound on any given occasion.
Having finished his tea and biscuits, Neville is consulting his Herbology references in preparation for the expedition to the formal gardens to view the carnivorous plant. He tells Narcissa that it's worrying that nothing corresponding to her description turns up in his books; he's concerned that it may be an invasive species, in which case they ought to inform the Ministry as soon as possible. In that case, Professor Sprout definitely will be interested in looking at it, and he will make sure that Madam Malfoy receives proper acknowledgments in any publication.
Narcissa thanks him in advance, after the fashion of a lady to her knight, for investigating this distressing matter.
He assures her that the pleasure, and the privilege, is all his. Hermione smiles, realizing that he caught himself before he uttered the phrase contributing to the advancement of science, but after all that's what he means. Augusta has been hinting to him that he might consider study at a Muggle university, for botany and Herbology are much the same thing in their essentials, and there are only so many species of magical plants.
Meanwhile, Draco has placed Hypatia carefully in Elizabeth Granger's lap, very definitely as if vouchsafing a treasure to reliable hands, while he waves his wand to summon the miniature Quidditch players to a game. Hypatia shrieks—she doesn't laugh yet, but this noise evidently means delight—and Elizabeth says to her daughter, "So this is the game you were mentioning in your letters."
William turns from his colloquy with Narcissa to watch. What Draco's mother likely doesn't know is that Elizabeth and William took the Prophet for years and William became quite addicted to the Quidditch pages, for which Hermione thanks (or blames) Arthur Weasley. It's the one thing William regrets about losing Ron Weasley as a prospective son-in-law, for Neville has no particular interest in the game. He can make conversation about it, just as he can chat with Andrew about football, but given his choice, he prefers other topics.
The players are in the colors of Bulgaria and Ireland, and Hermione, with a little twinge of romantic nostalgia, notices the likeness of Viktor Krum among them. She looks up to meet Neville's eyes, and is warmed by the smile that lights up his whole face. There is no jealousy, as there would have been with Ron, no regret or recrimination. Neville regards Viktor Krum with affectionate respect as a wizard and a man: perceptive enough to have recognized from afar what he had known for years.
It's the first time in months that she has thought of Ron, not as a colleague in the post-war reconstruction, but as the boy she thought she would marry.
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Hermione is quite sure that she never would have predicted any of this: not her parents taking tea with Narcissa Malfoy, not her mother playing virtual godmother to Draco's baby sister (the actual godmother being his Aunt Andromeda), certainly not Neville by her side. At the end of the war, she had been quite sure that place would be filled by Ron.
She still remembers the morning after the battle: just after sun-up, light breaking over the Great Hall, Ron's arm around her (Harry having vanished somewhere else), Neville eating breakfast in the Great Hall with the Sword of Gryffindor by his plate (as if it were part of the place setting, her brain absurdly filled in—the free-association of sleep deprivation there, no doubt). She remembers the way that Neville's shaggy hair kept hanging over his face and threatening to drag in the food…
She had a very definite picture of what was to come next: a very hot bath, the hottest she could find, and then clean pyjamas, and a bed. Sleep, and then breakfast with Ron. After that, in some order: finish her schooling, get a job, some sort of political job with the Ministry, and eventually marry Ron and have two or three little red-haired children with impossible hair.
The morning of the victory, with Ron's arm securely about her, solid as the world, for all they were both swaying from sleep deprivation and shuddering in relief that it was over, she'd watched the crowds of admirers around Neville: well, not to put too fine a point on it, a good number of them female. She and Ron had broken into laughter at the thought that Neville might be in danger of becoming the next Gilderoy Lockhart, admired by all the witches in Britain.
Not a serious danger, for once he finished his breakfast, he looked about in a bemused fashion, then shook hands all around. He did accept hugs and kisses from Ginny and Luna; in fact, there was a point when the three of them (the officers of the Hogwarts resistance, she realizes) stood, arms around each other, clinked their bottles of butterbeer in a toast to the rising sun—the sun they hadn't expected to see—and then waved to the crowds and shouted "Dumbledore's Army!" to thunderous applause… and then begun laughing, the sort of laughter that devolves all too quickly into weeping.
She and Ron made sure to draw off the reporters at that point, because she didn't want that on the front page of the Prophet, and Ron didn't either: Neville and Ginny and Luna collapsed in each other's arms, weeping like abandoned children, and what was most paradoxical of all, Luna (still thin from her captivity) with her arms around the other two, patting them as they sobbed, whether in joy at the reunion or sorrow for their dead schoolmates or simply relief that it was all over…
She never would have guessed that she and Ron would have come apart within a few months, and that she'd be hounded like a celebrity (which she was) and her life splashed across the Daily Prophet to the point where she'd want to leave the whole thing behind… which she did. She'd gotten an ordinary Muggle job, wrangled with the Ministry about getting her parents back from Australia, testified in the war crimes trials… and then thankfully, the whole thing was over, except for the slow grinding of the bureaucracy.
Shortly after the trials and the break-up with Ron, she'd come home from work to find a letter from Neville, a perfectly ordinary Muggle letter, stamp and all. "I wasn't sure when to telephone," he had begun, "if you have a telephone at all."
So it had begun, with a walking tour in Lancashire, as little like any of her experiences at Hogwarts as possible. Neville's friend Andrew had told him to invite a friend "from that mysterious school of yours. It must be awfully posh because we've never heard of it." Andrew's fiancée Miranda had been delighted that Hermione was both a girl and not mad for football. Neither of them had the faintest notion of who she was. They were friendly to her because she was Neville's school friend, and then because they noticed that she liked walking quite as much as they did; by the end of the day, they were quite satisfied with the expedition and already making plans for the next, with her participation quietly assumed.
It was Neville, actually, who'd drawn her back into the wizarding world, but the quiet, behind-the-scenes aspect of it, which sat well with her, because she'd had a lifetime's worth of the glare of publicity.
It had begun on that walking tour, in a quiet moment when he'd asked how well she'd been sleeping since the war… and then told her how he and Dean Thomas, both of whom existed in the Muggle world, had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. Had she…? Well, she had, she told him; they talked about how very circumspect they'd had to be when telling the NHS doctors about their experiences; then Neville told her about his conversations with Luna and with Ginny, who needed help as much as they did, but, having lived all their lives on the other side of the border, were having trouble getting treatment.
Thus had the petition for Shacklebolt been born, and thus, by a path she never would have anticipated, had she come to this fine summer morning, drinking tea with the mother of the boy who had appointed himself her enemy at school, and now was something in the nature of a family friend.
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The miniature Quidditch game amuses Hypatia, who doesn't understand yet but is fascinated by the flying figures. Several times, Hermione sees Draco's glance flicker from the Seekers to his sister and back, and she smiles at the notion that he's already grooming her for a career of Quidditch glory. If she did in fact inherit her parents' slim, light frames, and her brother's taste for competition, then she might well be a fine player—and it goes without saying that she'll have expert coaching from an early age.
William comments favorably at several clever turns of play, and Draco looks at him with a sharp, attentive glance and a bit of surprise, no doubt. It makes Hermione want to laugh, unmaliciously this time, at the idea of surprising Draco Malfoy, even though he's by no means the boy she knew under that name at school.
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