They were baked.
His remaining stash had entirely gone up in smoke. Well... almost entirely. He had decided to quit his self-medication, now that educating his magic was supposed to regulate his emotions, as ridiculous as it sounded. So naturally, they had to finish his stash, otherwise it would just have been wasted. Neither of them liked to waste things.
They were lying in his bed with the lights dimmed. Just chatting away while staring bloodshot eyed at the cracked, yellowish ceiling. She was under the covers and he was on top of them at her side, half-naked. The window was open to let the smoke escape, but he found the afternoon unseasonably warm. Maybe it had something to do with the column of fire that had appeared on his roof, earlier.
"Damn... We forgot to ask about the ribbons... What do you think they were for?"
"Mmmh... Probably communication devices, or a witch-summoning apparatus of some sort." Her voice had gotten better despite the smoke. She still preferred to speak in half-whispers.
"That makes sense... How did you test your nervous system?"
"Turns out it's pretty simple. EDA: Electro-Dermal Activity: you can just measure it on the skin, send a signal through some nerves... deduce their approximate resistance. It was pretty much zero, therefore I'm a superconducting witch." She shot her fist in the air in triumph.
"How is it possible though?"
"Well magic, duh. Didn't you hear the lady?"
"No I mean... Isn't the electrical charge carried between neurons by big-ass molecules and... Ions and whatnot? Can it still be superconducting if the current isn't made of electrons?"
"...Well, colour me impressed... Please don't take it the wrong way but I didn't expect you to know your biology."
"I have good memory, thanks to the chronic hallucinatory psychosis. Also, please don't take it the wrong way but I kind of expected you to think that biology is a joke sub-science not fit to wipe your theoretical physics feet on."
"Oh, it is... Okay get ready for real science, biotch. Usually, superconductivity appears when the electrons sync up with the... with the microscopic vibrations inside the conductor..."
She made waving motions with her hands at the ceiling, trying to illustrate.
"So instead of just an electron, you get two things moving as one: an electron plus a small mechanical wave. That's called a 'Cooper pair'... And the 'Cooper pairs', they... they can sort of phase through each other. Your particles don't to bump into each other, so they don't lose any energy as they move, and that means your conductor has zero resistance. That's superconductivity. Quantum stuff is pretty indistit... indist... Don't mock me it's my first time trying to speak with tetrahydrocannabinol in my bloodstream; Quantum stuff is pretty in-dis-tin-guishable from magic anyway; we don't actually understand everything about superconductors."
"So you just... Your nerve molecules are like ghosts phasing though each other?"
"...I don't think so... If I had to venture a guess, I think my neurons vibrate in exactly the right way to would forms pseudo-Cooper-pairs: mechanical waves in the cell with a charged molecule inside it instead of an electron... That would require a lot of impossible tweaking of the physical properties of cells to make superconductivity out of that but hey! Magic!" She had whispered the last words with the mystical tone of a prestidigitator showing off his assistant split in twain.
"I feel the understanding washing over me." He lied.
There was a pause as she dropped her still waving hands on the approximate location of his shoulder.
"Hey... I'm sorry about your parents."
"Don't worry about it. I never knew them... I've led a relatively happy life before I knew; it won't change just now."
"No... Well yes, I am sorry about them, but also I mean... I'm sorry about your adoptive parents. They sound like twats."
"Oh... Yeah they are. I also have a... a cousin, I guess. He's also a twat..." He trailed off.
"...Did you learn how to meditate from somewhere?"
"Yeah... but I've also learned how to juggle, and apparently I don't actually know how to do either of these things."
"How did you learn, though?"
"Books mostly. Well a book. By a certain Dr. Alphonso Doubledecker."
"That is a made up name."
"They're all made up" She smiled. She had hoped he'd reply with that kind of joke.
"...Can't ague with that."
"It was a decent method, though. I found it in the Dursley's house when I was young; I should still have it if you like... Why theoretical physics? You seem to like the experimental method, and from what I've gathered you don't get to use it much..."
"The truth is... Well I kind of knew about the magic thing. Stuff kept happening around me that shouldn't, so... I guess I wanted to see if I could find an explanation, and down the rabbit hole I went...'No Mrs. Granger,' they said 'Glass cannot shatter for no reason. It can break when it resonates with a sound at its proper frequency, or when its temperature varies quickly, and also there's a very funny thing called a 'prince Rupert's drop', you should look it up, but it can't just explode because you're looking at it funny: where would the energy come from?'..."One day – we had just seen the mass-energy correspondence and Noether's theorem in class... Basically the big theorem that ends up with 'energy doesn't just vanish'... And I had... Well I had said something really stupid to antagonize my parents... I don't remember exactly what..." she lied "...It's not important. Basically I was a teen having a crisis because I wasn't mature enough for college life, and I said something pretty terrible to them... Afterwards I felt awful and really embarrassed and alone... And during the night I just shrunk. Alice-In-Wonderland-style, I mean. I went to weigh myself – which wasn't really easy because I was so small... too small to see the needle on the kitchen scale: I had to drag my compact around the house which was already hard to navigate without a relatively huge mirror... In the end, I found out I weighed less than a hundred grams."
"Bollocks."
"That's what I said! Where did 99.9% of my mass go? If it just disappeared, there should be a massive explosion... Like the-whole-atmosphere-is-plasma kind of big. And I knew I wasn't crazy because it was way too structured to be a hallucination or a dream: I measured my weight properly, all my perceptions were coherent, I wasn't acting paranoid or agitated at all, considering... There was no smoking caterpillar or smiling cat in sight...
"So anyway... I've been studying Theoretical Physics in order to find a way to explain... well... magic. I wanted to find where can I insert magic so it fits in with physics. I thought I was the only one, though. I didn't expect to find a telekinetic cook."
"So what are you working on? For realsies... When you're not stripping fast-food chefs to 'experiment' on lab benches?"
"Constructive and Algebraic Quantum Field Theory."
"That... Is a made up name. See? All of them."
"Indeed... Basically I'm trying to prove that the most effective, most precise theory science has ever wrought is... well that it actually exists. Physicists keep using it but it's never been completely defined."
Harry chuckled "That seems like it would be a problem."
"The point is once I've done that, I can maybe expand on it and put magic where it should be... hey, how did you learn to cook?" She suddenly turned to face him.
There was an awkward pause as he took too long trying to formulate an answer. He hadn't been prepared for that question and he suspected she had purposefully taken him by surprise. She nudged him in the ribs with her finger from under the covers.
"Come on, I've been telling you my life story..."
"Yeah but... To tell you the truth, I don't know how to tell you mine without sounding all whiny and miserable."
"Oh. Is that why you always deflect?"
"What?"
"As soon as the conversation seems like you'd have to talk about personal matters, like your childhood or your family, you weasel out of it with a joke or a question about me."
"Oh? I'm sorry..." He took a drag on his self-medication, and sighed it out "Okay. I'll tell you but you may not... commiserate."
"Deal. So how did you learn how to cook?"
"By doing it. I had to: I mostly wasn't invited to the table when they ate; they stopped providing food for me as soon as I was physically capable of taking care of it myself. Pretty soon I had to cook for them, and they... had a knack for formulating criticism."
"How so?" He repressed a sigh at those memories.
"By shouting them in colourful language, and throwing the food away either at the garbage bin or at me. I could only eat after they were done, and... Well I wasn't allowed to eat very much... They'd accuse me of being wasteful, if you can believe it... I was pretty much hungry all the time, so starting over every time they didn't like it got pretty old pretty fast. So did cleaning up. So I had to get better at it."
"I'm not commiserating, this is an objective statement: that's awful."
"It was, but now I know how to cook, and I really enjoy cooking for myself and people I like..." He glanced at her. She noticed, but didn't seem to be quite finished with her inquiries.
"Why did you teach yourself meditation? Don't take it the wrong way but that's usually an... older people thing."
"That's a good question... I guess... I may not have ever really admitted it to myself, but weird stuff happened around me too." He started to reminisce events he hadn't thought about for a long while "Glass shattering was a classic... There was also a bit of levitation... Oh, and there was that whole debacle with the snake and Dudley – that's my cousin... He found himself in a pretty dangerous situation with a snake when a window pane just disappeared at the zoo... Did I... have a conversation with the snake, too?.. I'm not sure: I was pretty out of it at the time, and I'm pretty sure I have repressed most of it... Anyway, my family got pretty... vocal at me after these things happened... And they tended to happen when I was distraught, so I eventually made that connection, and decided to teach myself how to be in control of my emotions. Unfortunately it got harder as I got better."
"I know the feeling...What are their names? The parents? You made every effort not to say..."
"...Are you actually a shrink covering as a scientist?"
"After this one you're off the hook, I promise."
He sighed "Petunia and Vernon Dursley. Pretty mundane, huh?"
"Oh, you could have just told me that from the beginning: I would have despised them instantly... Thank you for telling me all this, Harry."
"Don't mention it. So do I get to ask you something, now?"
"Mmh... You may."
"Why do you work so much? With a brain like yours it's not like you couldn't take it a bit easier..."
"Oooh... That is a vengeful question..." She took the horrendous, shameful, illegal drugs from his hands: her rock-solid superego seemed to be waking up and it wasn't the best time. He smiled a bit, seeming proud that his question had struck a nerve.
"It is. Revenge is a dish best served lukewarm, with a pinch of irony."
"I guess I deserve it..."She sighed softly, letting out beautiful convolutions of intricate, scented turbulences escape from her lips and nose to waltz overhead. "It's the only thing I've ever known. Well... Not really, but I've always been the youngest and smartest in my class. Most gifted children end up... equalizing as they get older; I got worse and worse. Even at St-Mary's, I ended up kind of ostracised. In college, students were either envious or uninterested in making friends with a child, and those who made an effort, well... I wasn't very good at making an effort back at them. Teachers were very understanding, they tried to help me but they ended up out of their depth pretty soon too. Of course, the whole magical-mishaps getting more and more dangerous, the magnetizing computers and my being generally weird didn't help my feelings of inadequacy... "
"You're pretty good at conversation for someone who's had so many social difficulties growing up."
"Why, thank you! It's not been easy; it's pleasant for one's hard work to be acknowledged. Unfortunately, the only way I knew how to work on my sociability was to completely exhaust myself intellectually. Otherwise I would just be too tense and awkward and – figuratively – explode at people. Once, it was literal actually, but it was just a... stun grenade kind of thing. And only one person witnessed it, so I could pretend that he was just having a weird kind of epileptic seizure and let the doctors wonder what happened... He kind of deserved it anyway. But as you said, Hopefully, magical education is going to fix all that." She looked at the illegal herbs letting out a mesmerising trickle of blueish smoke as they consumed themselves between her fingers. "This stuff seems to be working pretty well too... I wish I'd discovered it sooner."
"Doesn't it? I found out about it in high school. I usually prefer it infused, both for the health of my lungs, and the dampening and increased duration of the effects."
"mmh..." She put it down "Wanna snog?" There was a short pause as a result of her unusually bold move; her superego had clearly gone back to sleep.
"...I do, very much. But – and I'm terribly sorry if this kills the mood, please blame it on the residual confusion from this morning – aren't you afraid that woman'll come back tomorrow and announce that..." He started to speak in a high pitched, terribly offensive imitation of Prof. McGonagall's posh voice.
"Mr Potter – Evans – Dursley – Harry dear. I'm terribly sorry but I've just realized: Dr Granger is actually your long lost sister whom everyone thought had been a stillbirth, but it turns out they had just mistaken her for a ripe melon wrapped in a towel. Also, her real name is Evangelica Mathurina Potter-Evans-Granger and she was conceived during a hailstorm which explains everything about her condition and why she was never found..."
Hermione was laughing a genuine, crystalline laugh. That was rare, usually she just flashed amused smiles and playfully judgemental eyes. She stopped pretty quickly, though.
"Oooh... Don't make me laugh, I'm still a bit sore... How come you get the fancy murder-accidental-suicide and I just sort of look like fruit?"
"Your wish is my command, milady" He started the imitation again "But actually, they just said that it was stillbirth. In fact, what happened is that an evil wizard, Herr Todesfallvernichtung, slipped on a melon and landed on her crib killing both himself and the melon! Evidently, someone (who shall remain anonymous because I totally don't know who it is, no I don't), someone thought it wise to protect her from Herr Todesfallvernichtung's dark guild of followers: the terrible... cancer gourmets... What are you doing?"
She was pulling the covers from under him, carefully wrapping herself into them as she exited the bed. He sat up against the wall to let her take them.
"I need to get something, and my pyjamas seem to have... poofed out of existence."
"Like the chair?" She was now rummaging in her handbag awkwardly with one hand, maintaining her heavy outfit in place with the other.
"Exactly like the chair. Fortunately..." She had to pause as she extracted a big hardcover book, with difficulty and laid it on the ground... "... the aforementioned..." and another – how heavy was this thing? Her handbag arm must have been made of tempered tungsten "...disappearing chair – pfew – tipped me off just in time, and I've been hiding under this duvet ever since. You didn't notice? Here." Her free arm handed him a photo, revealing flashes of naked shoulders as she stood by the side of the bed, looking like a brown haired burrito in her makeshift attire. That duvet was pretty heavy but she held it up with only one hand, four dainty fingers emerging from just under her throat and sinking into its folds. It must have been her handbag arm... He ripped his eyes from her and forcibly glued them to the photo.
"Are these your parents?"
"Yep." She pointed a helpful finger at their faces and explained: "Notice how they look nothing like you and neither do I."
"True, true indeed..." They had a happy smile and a confused-looking baby between them, overlooking a big cake with a single candle illuminating all of their faces. "You do, though... They seem nice" As he was admiring the picture, savouring an inexpressible emotion in the back of his mind, he felt one of her hands rest comfortably on his shoulder. Then, he saw the other one gently take the photograph away, dragging his thoughtful gaze along with it... She laid the photograph face down on the nightstand, all the while keeping her left hand on his shoulder.
"So?.. Wanna snog?"
He nodded at her, a dazed look in his dilated pupils: "Yes, please."
Thanks for the reviews! Please review this one too, I need all the input I can get.
In fact, I especially need your help today: this one was particularly hard to write, between the science talk and the ending.
I wanted the hands thing at the end to be subtle, but not to the point of being completely invisible. So I've added more and more hints, and now I'm afraid it's too obvious. I think it's perfectible but I'd need your input... So please, show of hands, everyone:
Who caught it? How was it if you did?
Who caught it and thought it was pretty obvious?
Who caught it, but only because I just now mentioned that there was a hands thing at the end?
Who has no idea what I'm talking about?
Also, I promise the magical world is coming soon; I just wanted to develop the characters before they discovered it.
And consider this story disclaimed and Mrs Rowling thanked for her goodwill and patience towards our community of amateur writers.