[A/N: Thank you to Calamity Owl for beta-reading this chapter!]


"I've got an update for you, Rookie," Sue said.

"Ouch!" Harry replied as his arse came down hard back into his chair. One of these days, Sue wasn't going to catch him off-guard like that.

She snickered and passed him a parchment. "That will never stop being fun. Anyway, there's an update for you on Marcus Flint's case."

Harry rolled his eyes before skimming the parchment. "So his lawyer allowed the Veritaserum questioning to go through? I thought he was fighting that tooth and nail."

"The compromise was that all questions have to be routed through his lawyer," Sue said. "If he objects, there will be a judge on hand to determine whether he'll be forced to ask it."

"That's understandable for a normal criminal, but Marcus is facing the Veil," Harry said. "Even if there wasn't much chance of stopping the Veritaserum questioning, I would have thought the lawyer would try anyway. A concession to protect Marcus's secrets isn't going to help the man much on the Other Side."

Sue grinned. "Morgana, I love working with you. That is exactly the question I asked. "The barrister just wants the conviction and doesn't care what else he might be guilty of, since he's probably going to be dead in a few days. I see something like this, though, and it makes me wonder what else Marcus might know."

"It doesn't sound like we'll be able to get that out of him during questioning now." Harry frowned. "Is there anything else unusual, maybe that we could use to get a warrant to search his home or bring known associates in for questioning?"

"I don't think…wait, the solicitor was also unusually pushy about getting Flint's possessions returned to him so he could pass them to his next of kin," Sue said. "That's supposed to happen tomorrow."

Harry grinned. "To the Evidence Room?"

"To the Evidence Room," Sue said firmly.

Without another word, they hurried down to the evidence lockers and signed for the evidence from the Flint case. Sue poured it out of its magical stasis bag onto the evidence room analysis table and they stared at the surprisingly ordinary collection: a few assorted sickles and knuts, a handkerchief, a Firewhisky flask, pocketknife, a blank scrap of parchment, and a wand.

"That's it?" Harry asked. "That's probably not enough to pay for the time it took the solicitor to prepare the letter demanding it."

"We must be missing something," Sue said. "Let's see if the table knows something we don't."

Harry stepped back as she tapped some runes on the table with her wand. "I thought a quick table analysis of evidence was mandatory. Wouldn't that have been in the initial case report?"

"It is mandatory, but that doesn't mean the DMLE flunky assigned to do it actually did it," Sue said. "Once you've been here long enough you learn not to trust anyone but yourself to do their Morgana-forsaken job."

The table hummed for a moment in a way that somehow made Harry's bones vibrate instead of his eardrum before it lit up in two places: underneath Marcus's wand and under the blank parchment.

"Well, would you look at that?" Sue said. "This case just got a little more interesting."

"How can we get that analysed before we have to give it back, though?" Harry asked.

"We have an unknown magical item here that may have been used in an assault on an Auror," Sue said. "We can't allow it out of the building until we finish analysing it."

"Will that work? It was pretty clear how they hurt us."

Sue smirked. "Is it really, though? If we knew for certain what this was, we could easily rule it out, but since we don't…"

"I like how you think," Harry said.

"The bureaucracy around here can be ridiculous," Sue said. "We might as well use that to our advantage." She levitated all of the items back into the evidence bag, following standard safety protocol of not touching unknown magical items. "Let's get back upstairs. I'll write the memo blocking release of the goods while you work on the Unspeakable Assistance Form. If anyone can figure it out, they can."

The next day, Harry heard through the department grapevine that Flint's lawyer had thrown an epic fit about the personal items, but Sue's memo was airtight and the man's screamed obscenities were all for naught. Marcus Flint went to the Veil that afternoon without his knuts, sickles, and mysterious parchment.

Unfortunately, the Unspeakables were unable to tell them much about the parchment. Someone had worked a Protean Charm into it that allowed it to display a few lines of text, but until whoever had the master parchment sent a message it would remain blank. The best they could do was set up a magical monitor to alert them if any text did appear.


As the November weeks passed, Hermione found herself settling into a comfortable routine. Different days each week were set aside for her Potions, Transfiguration, and Charms lessons, with an hour here and there for Occlumency. One noontime was always lunch with Sue, and one full day was Herbology work with Neville plus lunch with him, and supper six nights a week was with Harry no matter what time he returned home. (The seventh was set aside for him to have dinner with his friends at work.) They even started having a pint or two at the local pub every week, which was a new tradition for Hermione and something she was surprised to find herself enjoying.

As Hermione's skill at potioneering grew, she took over making more and more of the regular household potions they used. Harry admitted that he'd never quite gotten back into Potions after his experience with Snape, and Hermione was happy to be able to contribute something new. The Black Library had some useful books for that work, as well as…other things.

Hermione's exploration of Second-Year Potions also yielded some new conversations between Lily and Snape. Most were short question & answer interactions, which Hermione logged carefully even though Harry never bothered reading them more than once. By mid-November, though, she'd found an interaction that demanded serious attention.

"So the bursting mushrooms definitely won't explode?" Lily asked.

"They have to be neutralised by an Enervating Curse before harvesting," Snape said. "If they could still explode, they would have done so already."

Hermione shivered with the memory of the curse that had nearly killed Harry and continued reading. The next note seemed to indicate some sort of time skip.

"Why can't we grind the wartcap powder before we start the potion?" Lily asked. "I was getting nervous trying to grind it while the potion was still on the heat."

"I know, but the fresh grind is important to the absorption of the ingredient," Snape replied. "Your potion still came out perfectly."

"Thank you," Lily said. "I don't believe how people used to need these potions to avoid being burnt as witches."

"Believe it," Snape said. "That's one of the many problems with muggles. They hate anything that's different."

"I was a muggle until barely three years ago." Something about the sharper quillstrokes in this line and the way the 'I' was underlined conveyed how pointedly she must have thought that statement.

"You were never a muggle," Snape wrote, and Hermione had to suppress a snicker at how fast the poor boy was backtracking. "You've always been a witch, whether you knew it or not. You're so much more than muggle."

"Where does that train of thought end?" Lily asked. "If I'm more than a muggle, is a Pureblood more than me?"

"Magical heritage doesn't make you a better witch or wizard," Snape wrote. "It just helps you appreciate magical culture and heritage more."

Hermione wasn't buying that and neither did the long-ago twelve-year-old girl who penned the next note. "So," Lily wrote, "James appreciates magical culture and heritage more than you do?"

"Perhaps," Snape wrote, his short quillstrokes evoking the gritted teeth of a teenage boy grinding that word into the margin of his textbook. "Though I doubt he's capable of doing so."

"James is a prat who loves talking about how great an athlete is, how wealthy he is, and how good-looking he is," Lily wrote. "Yet even though he's a member of one of the oldest wizarding families, he's never once bragged about his blood. Do you think he should have?"

Hermione derived no small amount of satisfaction from Snape's lack of response, and she had a feeling Lily had, too.

When she showed Harry that conversation later that night, he read it twice through before setting down the book, looking into the dancing flames in the fireplace, and sighing. "You can see their friendship starting to fray, can't you?" he asked.

Hermione nodded. "She's asking some pointed questions there."

"She seems to have been uncommonly good at that," Harry said. "I…I still loathe Snape, but I hate to see my mother realising he's not the friend she thought he was."

"It's like watching a slow-motion car wreck," Hermione said. "I want him to get his head out of his bum, but I know it's going to get worse."

"That's an understatement," Harry said. "He loved her and he joined a terrorist group dedicated to eliminating people like her."

"He loved her?" Hermione's eyes widened.

Harry laughed bitterly. "Enough to ask his Dark Lord, a.k.a. Tom Riddle, to spare her life when he left to kill my father and me. She refused and died begging for my life."

Hermione stared at the fire in silence with Harry for a long minute. Finally, she said, "I don't know what Snape truly felt for Lily, but that's not love."

"You're right," Harry said, and for the next half-hour they just held each other and watched the flames burn away the night.


Harry had just settled in for some after-dinner reading on the evening of November 26th when the floo lit up.

"I'll get it!" Hermione said. Harry raised his eyebrows in surprise when Nev's head popped out of the floo and told Hermione he was ready.

"Great!" She turned to Harry. "I'm off to do some late-night plant collection with Nev. I'll be back before bedtime."

"Good luck." Harry got up and met Hermione on the threshold between the floo room and the sitting room, where he received a quick peck on the lips as a "goodbye."

Harry tried to go back to reading, but he found himself distracted by the silence. There was no rustling of parchment from the couch, no scratching of a quill, and no little "hmmm" as she tried to wrap her head around a new concept. Just plain old silence. How had he gotten so accustomed to having her around in such a short time?

He sighed and focused on his book. He couldn't even go and hang out with Sirius and Remus, since it was a full moon that night…which, now that he thought of it, was probably why Nev had invited Hermione to go with him. Harry didn't remember Potions or Herbology that well, but he knew at least some plants had different properties in the light of a full moon. This would probably be a great learning experience for her.

Or at least that's what he told himself. He was still probably a little more excited than he should have been when she popped out of the floo a little after eleven that evening.

"Welcome home!" Harry said as he arose from his armchair.

"Thank you!" Hermione dusted herself off and gave him a quick hug. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get this upstairs and sorted before I go to bed."

"Oh, what did you collect?" Harry asked.

"Part of your Christmas present," she said. "No peeking!"

"OK, no peeking." As she walked up the stairs, Harry tried to figure out what kind of gift she could possibly be collecting, but quickly realised his Herbology knowledge simply wasn't up to the task. Besides, he now had a much more pressing problem: a reminder that Christmas was coming and he once again had a witch to shop for.

"Oh, and Harry?" Hermione came back down the stairs just enough to be able to see him. "You have bought far too much for me this year. I don't want to see a single gift from you, do you understand?"

"How did you know I was just thinking about that?" he asked.

"Just a hunch," she said. "Seriously, nothing."

"If you're sure." He paused. "This isn't a trick, is it, where you really do want something but you're telling me that you don't because you want to see if I'll get it for you anyway?"

She blinked. "Um…do people actually do that?"

"Well, Ginny occasionally did stuff like that, though not so extreme."

"Oh, wow," she said. "Listen, Harry, if I ever do expect you to know something, I'll make that clear. Like, if I've told you weekly for all of November that I want one thing and on December first you ask me what thing I want, I'll probably express some disappointment with you."

"That's fair," Harry said.

"And just so we're clear," Hermione said, "I am definitely not trying to trick you. You have purchased more for me than I could ever ask this year and I just want you to let me get something nice for you."

"If you're sure…"

"I'm sure," she said.

As she climbed back up the stairs, all Harry could think was, "Damn it, now she's just gone and made picking a gift out even harder."


Remus leaned back and stretched. "You're doing well with your Occlumency, Hermione. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone picking it up quite as quickly as you have."

"Thank you," she said. "It helps that I've been organising my mind like this ever since I was a child to help me retain what I read."

"Why am I not surprised?" he said. "That's arguably even more impressive. With any luck, you might start recovering memory fragments randomly as you go through your daily life during the next month or two."

"That's great," Hermione said. "We need to find this person before they hurt anyone else."

"I agree," Remus said. "Now, if you wouldn't mind discussing a lighter topic for a moment, do you have any good gift ideas for Harry? He's dreadfully hard to shop for, since he doesn't really do much besides cook and hunt criminals and he has enough money to buy anything that really strikes his fancy."

"I understand," Hermione said. "Do you think he'd mind a new piece of furniture? There was something I was thinking of getting for him, but I don't have the money."

"He could probably be persuaded on a new piece of furniture if it were useful enough," Remus said. "And you can go in on your suggestion with us if you'd like. We know you're not really earning anything right now."

"Thank you, but I had a different idea for all of you," Hermione said. "Anyway, my old boss had an antique that he was always meaning to sell and never quite got around to. I think we could convince him to give it to us for a good price and Harry might really like it."

Remus smiled. "That sounds great. Shall I bring Sirius?"

"Does…um…he do well blending into muggle areas?" Hermione asked.

"Never mind," Remus said.


Harry leaned back against his armchair and tapped his foot. They were going to be late if they didn't leave in the next few minutes, and it was already snowing outside.

"I'm sorry!" Hermione said as she hurried down the stairs. "I wanted to finish that one last Charms lesson so I could legitimately say I was done with all of my Second-Year material."

"You could have just said you were nearly done, you know." Harry rose from his seat and pulled on his coat.

"It's not the same," Hermione said. "I wanted it to be done so I didn't have to worry about it for the rest of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day." She put down a small box so she could pull her coat on.

"I understand." Harry helped her with her coat and put his own on. "So, are you going to tell me what's in the box that you've been working on for weeks?"

"You'll find out when it's your turn," she said as she put the box into her purse. "Now, shall we? We don't want to be late."

Harry's jaw dropped. "But…you…"

She smiled impishly.

"I don't believe I walked into that," Harry said.

"I almost don't, either," Hermione said.

"Almost?"

She arched her eyebrows.

"Fine, I'll take what I can get." Harry Disillusioned first her and then himself, the familiar dripping oil sensation of the spell coating his whole body in a moment. "Are you ready?"

"Yes. How will you find m–" she stopped as Harry wrapped his arm around her waist. "You got me to talk so you could follow my voice, didn't you?"

"I have a few tricks up my sleeve," Harry said.

"Well played," Hermione said. "So where are we going?"

"You'll see," Harry said. "Hang on."

One stomach-churning trip later, they were straightening themselves up on a snow-covered metal walkway. Between the snow, the wind whipping in their faces, and the disorientation from apparition, Harry was grateful for the metal railing surrounding them.

"Goodness, where are we?" Hermione said, trying to shield her eyes with her free hand as she spoke.

"The visibility isn't as good as I was hoping," Harry said, "but look around."

Hermione did her best to straighten up and take in her surroundings, at which point she gasped. "Harry! Is this St. Paul's?" All of London stretched out around them, blanketed in white and looking almost peaceful, or at least as peaceful as a huge city could be. The Thames flowed along nearby, doggedly ignoring the cold and snow.

"Yes," he said. "I snuck up here on a day off last week to memorise it for apparition. The view is amazing, and it's closed at this time of year so we're safe being up here."

"This is wonderful," Hermione said. "Thank you for bringing me here."

"This is just the start." Harry drew his wand and silently unlocked the door leading back into the interior of the church's massive dome. "Follow me. I'm afraid there are a lot of steps, but at least we'll be going down."

"OK," Hermione said.

Harry led her down the spiral staircase back into the dome, but only a few steps down, she bumped into him. Only his excellent reflexes and good grip on the railing prevented a painful tumble.

"I'm so sorry!" Hermione said.

"It's alright," Harry said. "You know, we don't really need the Disillusionment Charms in here. Let me replace them with basic Muggle Notice-Me-Not Charms. This way, we'll be able to see each other."

"Thank you," Hermione said when he'd finished. "This seems a lot safer."

"I agree." Harry led them down an interminable series of tight spiral staircases connected to short landings that gradually took them further into the heart of the dome. Eventually, they found themselves at a heavy fire door.

"Be as quiet as possible through here," Harry told her. She nodded, and Harry unlocked the door with another silent Unlocking Charm.

On the other side of the door, they found themselves in a circular viewing gallery set into the side of the dome. "The Whispering Gallery!" Hermione hissed excitedly.

Harry nodded. "It's closed today," he whispered back. "They're about to start."

A service was just beginning below, and a few minutes later the choir burst into song. Hermione closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall, allowing an expression of serene rapture to settle onto her face.

She opened her eyes again when the song ended and found Harry staring into them, a big smile on his face. "Thank you," she whispered. "This is wonderful."

"You're welcome," he whispered back. The Whispering Gallery was closed during the service, so they stayed up there without being disturbed until it concluded. Once it was done, Harry led Hermione back through the fire door and apparated them both away.

"Where are we now?" Hermione asked once she'd recovered. "I don't recognize this alley."

"It's a little spot a lot of wizards and witches use to apparate to Oxford High Street," Harry said. "We're just a couple of blocks away. You mentioned wanting to see the Christmas displays."

"That's…incredibly convenient," Hermione said. "Magic is amazing, and so are you. First, you take me to listen to beautiful choir music, and now you're taking me to look at the Christmas decorations on Oxford High Street?" She leaned up and kissed him. "Best boyfriend ever."

Harry felt his cheeks warming up even in the cold weather. "Well, you said you didn't want me to spend any money on a Christmas gift for you, so I thought we could do some things you'd mentioned that didn't cost anything."

"Oh, Harry." Hermione wrapped him in a huge hug. "That's so thoughtful. Thank you."

He was definitely getting used to those hugs.

The Christmas lights on Oxford Street were stunning, as always. This year, the decorations on the street were mostly in the colours of the Olympic rings, since London was apparently preparing a bid for the 2012 Olympics and wanted to show some spirit. Harry didn't think those colours were necessarily the most Christmas-y in the world, but the huge light-up snowflakes and Christmas presents suspended over their heads were nonetheless impressive.

At one point, Harry stopped and stared at a photo from the Oxford Street lighting ceremony. "That actress looks just like you," he told Hermione.

She blushed. "In my dreams. She's far prettier and her hair is much, much tamer than mine."

"I disagree about her being prettier," Harry said, "but I suppose you're right about your hair. I don't think your hair makes you any less pretty, though."

Hermione blushed even more deeply and moved them along from the poster. Harry caught her staring at the same poster once or twice more as they walked, which for some reason made him smile.

Several of the stores had fantastic window displays for the season, but Selfridge's was, as usual, the undisputed champion. After an hour or so of taking in the displays, Hermione brought them to a halt near the Marble Arch. "Harry, you've been a great sport so far, but I'm starting to get hungry and I suspect you're starving. Would you like to get some food?"

"Definitely," he said. "Would you like to go home?"

"Not yet," Hermione replied. "I know a fun place just a couple of blocks away." She led them back to Selfridge's before turning right and walking another block.

"Another church?" Harry asked when they stopped.

"It was once," Hermione said. "Now, it's…well, come in and see."

He followed her into the old church. There was a coffee shop in the entryway, but that in no way prepared him for what was in the main hall of the church.

"Hermione," he said slowly, "why is there a street market inside this church?" He looked up. "A two-story street market, I mean. Is this normal? I haven't been in many churches but it seems like this isn't normal."

"It is here," she replied. "This church was deconsecrated years ago and it's now a food market. They have amazing street food here and we're not exposed to the elements."

"That sounds great," Harry said. They queued up for some Chinese pork buns, which were basically warm balls of doughy goodness with meat inside and exactly what Harry needed after spending all that time out in the cold. After lunch, they apparated home and freshened up before heading back out into the snow for a walk to 12 Grimmauld Place.