March 1995
While Liz was preoccupied with the Triwizard Tournament and her own personal stuff, the world continued to go on beyond the mountains walling off Hogsmeade Valley. It filtered back into the school occasionally, in gossip, or a lot of chatter when some important event or another happened. But today was a big one: the language of the public education act had been finalised, a date for the vote set. Liz was a little blindsided when she came up to breakfast to see the announcement on the front page of both major newspapers. She'd known it was coming, of course, Sylvia was keeping her informed, but she'd kind of forgotten about the reaction everyone else would have...
Of course, that wasn't the only politics thing happening — some of it even had to do with Liz herself, directly or indirectly. The one most directly having to do with her, and also the silliest most frivolous thing going on that people had bothered her about, word about Liz sending things to orphanages and the werewolf group home had finally spread far enough that Rita couldn't sit on it anymore. Liz understood the logic of setting the narrative themselves before anyone else could scoop it out from under them, but she still found the whole thing fucking annoying. It was kind of her fault for sending stuff whenever holidays came around — she'd done another round on Imbolc, it probably wasn't a coincidence that word had started getting around a couple weeks later — but baking was a good way to keep herself occupied (and her mind off bad topics), and Sylvia said it was perfectly normal for fancy noble people to do charity shite on the holidays, so...
Liz realised that the controversy was the particular people she'd decided deserved her charity, but she didn't give a shite — those group homes sounded miserable, the racist bastards who didn't like it could go fuck themselves.
There'd been an article in Witch Weekly about it — Rita had intentionally gone for Witch Weekly instead of the Prophet, in part because she knew Liz hated her personal life being newsworthy for stupid fucking reasons, and also framing it as a cute celebrity story (blech) was more politic than she could be in the Prophet — which, as much as Liz was irritated about the whole thing, wasn't that bad, really. Rita played up the orphan-having-sympathy-for-orphans angle, and being perfectly honest about Liz just playing around in the kitchen because why not, sending the shite she made to the werewolf kids really being an afterthought. Because their lives sounded miserable, yes, but it wasn't like she'd started doing it with the goal of making stuff for them specifically in mind, just the best place she could think of to send the excess she wouldn't be able to eat herself. The piece made her sound kind of silly and flighty and super super girly, but honestly she was fine with that. If people write it off as just a little girl being silly, so much the better, as far as she was concerned...since that's basically all it was, not like she was trying to make a big political statement or anything...
Of course, Rita couldn't control people writing in to the Prophet and Herald's opinion sections about it the next week — that stuff was more mixed. Liz hadn't bothered reading them, generally, but her friends did read the papers, and there were a few they insisted on showing her. One, because it was written by some racist bastard in Ars Brittania, and Tracey thought it was important for Liz to know who her enemies were. Not that it was really a surprise, she kind of assumed all the Light lords hated her. The bloke in question — something Atwell, Liz didn't actually know if he was the head of the family or not — was openly genocidal about werewolves in the thing, basically saying the ones who couldn't support themselves, or whose families weren't taking responsibility for them, should just be executed. He didn't quite come out and say that, but that's what he meant — and he was especially unsympathetic about the ones who'd been muggles before they were turned. (A lot of werewolves were muggles, actually, for complicated reasons that weren't really important.) The reason Tracey was showing it to her was because he said some pretty shitty things about her...sort of indirectly, actually more talking about their precious Girl Who Lived being corrupted by bad influences, clearly they needed to get her away from the evil Death Eater before he turned her into a race traitor. Again, didn't come directly out and say that, but it was what he meant. Liz didn't think there was any danger that he could get Ars Brittania to transfer her trusteeship to someone the Light approved of, especially since Severus could just end it at any time, and she already knew the Atwells sucked, but whatever, she guessed.
She was kind of taken aback by the vitriol against the werewolf kids, honestly. She wasn't unaware that people were extremely racist about werewolves — or "racist" wasn't the right term, she guessed. Eugenics...-alist? Whatever. Anyway, she knew people were bastards about them, but she'd never entirely understood why — especially since she'd learned battlemagic that could slow one down long enough to escape if she really needed to — so she'd just written it off as stupid nonsense and ignored it, didn't pay that much attention. It was fucking absurd, just...
(They were only kids.)
According to her friends, that was really the only one that was too directly about her, most of the other ones just using the story as a jumping off point to be terrible about werewolves and poor people in general. (She also sent gifts to orphanages and sanctuaries, which some people also had to be bastards about.) Some of them only used it as a random point while mostly talking about the education programme thing, or the situation with the Gaels, or whatever, it all sounded very tedious, Liz didn't need to waste her time reading it. Though her friends also gave her a couple to read of people backing her up — also mostly just using the story as a jumping off point to talk about their own politics, but in a positive way this time.
One of them was from some Eirsley, which wasn't really a big surprise. They were political allies now — they were both in Ars Publica, and the Eirsleys were particularly close with the Slughorns, so they had connections through Sylvia — and also the Eirsleys were kind of infamously communalist sympathisers. There was that rumour going around about Liz being a neocommunalist now, she wouldn't be surprised if that had something to do with that Eirsley bloke being so positive about it. Liz was a little surprised at the opinion piece from Millicent Bagnold, the former Minister. The piece was positive toward Liz, but it definitely wasn't positive overall — Bagnold thought the fact that someone like Liz felt the urge to do that sort of thing in the first place was a fucking disagrace, because what good was a society that couldn't even take care of its own children? And, if nothing else, some of the shite other people said about werewolves in reaction to the news was proof that there was obviously still work to do, as far as cleansing their government of Death Eater influence went.
Bagnold didn't directly come out and say that the people calling for werewolves to be executed should themselves be executed, but that's what she meant — kind of indirectly, Liz thought, making a point about people like that Atwell. It was hilarious, honestly, clearly Bagnold had used up all her tact during her time in office, zero shites left to give...
So, yeah, Liz would call the reaction mixed. In the rest of the country, anyway, Liz would actually call the reaction at school mostly positive...or at least among the people she actually talked to — she was pretty sure it wouldn't have made any difference to the people who'd already hated her anyway. A couple of the girls in the study group even asked if they could start making snacks to have for meetings which, um, she didn't see why not? Kind of a silly thing to do, Liz thought, especially when they could just ask the kitchen elves, but...
There was a bit of teasing about being super girly — and apparently a lot of the purebloods thought she was such a mum, which was kind of embarrassing — but it wasn't that bad, really. She'd had much worse.
Other news was only sort of indirectly about her, sometimes. The Gaelic nationalist stuff was still ongoing, Liz wasn't really paying attention. Apparently Síomha was mentioned sometimes, which wasn't really a surprise — supposedly she was somewhat important in Saoirse Ghaelach, though Liz honestly had no idea what her position in the organisation actually was. (She assumed Síomha was in the leadership of the militia side, but maybe she was just famous for the thing with the Glasgow Seven, so she was talked about disproportionately to her actual importance? No idea.) Liz hadn't bothered hiding that she thought the Gaels had a point, and Severus was dating Síomha, so, when something came up about it in the papers people sometimes made a point of making it her problem. Mostly easily ignorable, but still. Honestly, Liz wasn't paying attention — she knew stuff was happening, but she didn't really know what, she had her own shite to worry about.
Some neocommunalists were making a stink about letting Grindelwald out of prison, but Liz was pretty sure they were just fucking with conservatives, she didn't think that was actually going to happen any time soon.
And today, of course, everyone was talking about magical Britain starting a public education system — fucking finally. All bloody day, when they weren't in classes and not allowed to talk, all the conversation going on around the school was about that. People with close relatives in the Wizengamot answering questions about what was actually in the package, less informed muggleborns completely flabbergasted by how terrible education in this country was, debate over the implications of one point or another, blah blah. It was assumed that the package was definitely passing — it wouldn't be moving forward to a final vote if they didn't already know for certain it was going through — so they were kind of talking like it was already a thing, these were changes that were going to happen in the country. Not that they were wrong about that, Sylvia was pretty sure it'd clear by, maybe, seven or eight votes.
Which meant it wouldn't fuck anything up if Liz didn't vote for it.
Sylvia had been keeping her informed, so, Liz was fully aware that the package sucked, in subtle ways that weren't immediately obvious if you hadn't actually read it. Or that most people who had any influence on the outcome even cared about, if she was being honest. One thing people who thought this was great progress or whatever seemed to be missing was, like, the people designing the package were a bunch of racist, elitist sons of bitches, okay — they were literally nobility, they weren't about to implement anything that threatened their own position. Society was structured to serve the interests of the people at the top, Liz was sure she'd read someone saying something about that...
Anyway, so, racist as fuck, yes, that was a thing. They were going to get public schools, sure, but only for humans — humans who weren't indentured, to be precise. (Slaves still didn't get an education, naturally.) Also goblins...but not goblins in general, specifically just the exiles. Not that other goblins would want to go to their schools anyway, but even if they did, they were legally excluded. Veela and lilin could go, but only certain institutions which specifically opened themselves to veela/lilin students, and who had measures in place to deal with enthrallment — wards to partially suppress the effects of their influence, and also at least one mind mage on staff, to reverse any 'damage' they did. And there were residency requirements too, of course, that part was reasonable.
The veela/lilin thing was fucking stupid, for multiple reasons. A big deal had been made of Hogwarts saying they'd accept veela/lilin students, as a signal for other schools to make the effort to 'accommodate' them, but that was horseshite — the application process was still going to be exactly as restrictive and elitist as it already was, the chances of any nonhumans getting through it was practically zero. Also, the shite they had to set up wasn't to 'accommodate' the veela/lilin, but instead to ease the paranoia of people who were stupidly racist about them. And they didn't even do what they said they did! According to Alexis, the kinds of wards they were talking about didn't actually stop the funny veela/lilin soul magic shite from working — they could still 'enthral' whoever they wanted — it just acted as a general suppression, making the effects dissipate more quickly. Veela/lilin mostly wouldn't even notice they were there. Artèmi said Liz might be more affected than Alexis — those wards would prevent her aura from spreading out quite so far, and would also work to clean at least some psychometric shite out of the environment. It'd probably be less unpleasant just existing in the Castle for Liz, and Seers and general — in fact, some public buildings on the Continent implement similar wards just for that reason — but it wouldn't stop veela/lilin from affecting the minds of everyone around them.
Also, a mind healer couldn't do fuck all about this shite — people did know the veela/lilin stuff was soul magic, right?
Sylvia had suggested, half-seriously, that the way the system was set up might be used as a convenient way to expel veela/lilin students on demand, or maybe even prosecute them for crimes. (The age of contract would still be thirteen, after all.) If one took the advertised function of the wards at face value, one could assume that a veela/lilin who was still influencing people must be forcing the magic on purpose. Also, the function of the mind healer on staff could very easily not be the one claimed at all. See, the 'enthrallment' people talked about — effectively brainwashing someone into a person who better suited what you wanted from them — wasn't really a thing. Well, okay, it was possible, it just took far more time and effort than most people who didn't know shite about mind magic assumed. (There were a lot of scary stories about the Morrigan out there, whatever, didn't matter.) But, see, if a human kid was making friends with a veela or lilin, and their parents didn't approve of it, the mind healer on staff gave them a method to put a stop to that immediately: just get the mind healer to claim that the veela/lilin is enthralling the kid and have them expelled — problem solved!
Yeah, Sylvia hadn't been completely serious, but Liz couldn't help the nasty suspicion that she might have a point. Judging by how fucking racist they'd made the terms themselves, Liz was pretty sure they didn't plan on including veela and lilin at all — they just wanted to make it look like they were. Because politics.
And, of course, nymphs and wilderfolk didn't get to go. Kind of by default, technically? People in indenture weren't included in the programme, and standing law in Britain remanded all nymphs and wilderfolk in the country into indenture — the education law didn't make a specific carve-out for nymphs and wilderfolk to be able to go regardless of their legal status, so. Sylvia thought it was very possible that wilderfolk who managed to present human enough to pass by without notice could go if they wanted to, since it wasn't like anybody checked, but the number of wilderfolk who were capable of doing that were very, very few. It was worth asking whether any nymphs and wilderfolk would want to go anyway — especially since all the schools were going to be entirely run by human mages, with fully human staff — but the option had been withheld from them regardless.
So, yes, racist, bad, but there were some pretty serious other problems too. The funding was going to be an issue, for example. The number of people who were going to be able to go to academy was going to be limited for some time — they'd need to ramp up school attendance and build entirely new buildings, yes, but there was also the issue with getting enough wands. The things were extremely advanced, sensitive magical instruments, they were fucking expensive. Currently, the Ministry gave Ollivander subsidies to keep the price for a student's first wand around seven galleons — a second could easily cost twenty to as much as fifty, or sometimes even more, depending on materials — if they wanted to keep the price stable while expanding academy education they'd need to greatly increased the subsidies, or else risk the price increasing. Seven galleons was already a bit much for most people to afford, that was, what, a little under two thousand pounds? More than that, relatively speaking, since the average person didn't exactly have a lot of cash. If they wanted normal commoners to be able to go to academy, they'd probably have to bring the price down even further than that, and who the hell knew if the Wizengamot was willing to authorise that kind of subsidy.
And, of course, even if they could find the money somewhere, they were inevitably going to run into a different problem: Britain only had the one wandmaker. House Ollivander's monopoly on the craft within British borders was guaranteed by law, the chances of that changing were miniscule, and there were only a couple Ollivanders who actively practised the craft. Zoë was about ready to begin working independently, and Garrick had promised to start training additional apprentices to help ramp up production as the education system got going, but there was still going to be a hard limit to how many they could make in a year. They did have a cache of pre-made wands built up, those could last for a while, but there was no telling when or if they'd ever pair with people — wands could be finicky like that — and a while was not forever.
And the cache of pre-made wands depleting would ultimately increase the cost of new wands, naturally, which would continue to drive the price up, simply due to scarcity, and putting further pressure on whatever suppliers Ollivander used. (Secret trade stuff, kept in the family, nobody really knew for sure.) Keeping the price at something reasonable was going to be...complicated. People could theoretically go overseas for wands, but that wasn't practical for everyone...
There was a relatively simple solution to that problem, of course: most other ICW countries had essentially nationalised the production of wands. Most of them had a history similar to Britain, with the craft being limited to a single family or a tight guild, before the demands of further spreading wizardry to the masses had obligated increasing production more than market forces could maintain. In some of them, the same family (or families) were still technically running it, but they lived on a government salary, necessary materials and whatever else provided for — foreign citizens normally had to pay a fee (usually well less than the seven galleons standard in Britain, but it varied by country), but domestic citizens often didn't have to pay anything at all, their wand essentially provided by the state. The wandcrafters tended to take a bit of a hit to their living standards in the transition — for that reason this had happened during the Revolution in most places — but it was still considered a pretty good cushy job, and all the respect for the role in the culture had been preserved, so, they still had it pretty good, all things considered. And normal working-class people could get wands, so it seemed like a pretty fair deal.
But that almost certainly wasn't going to happen in Britain — the nobles still had power here, and the Ollivanders were even one of them. The Ollivanders were still in a position to dictate terms, and that wasn't likely to change any time soon.
The issues with the expansion of craft school were somewhat more limited. The guilds were deeply involved in craft schooling, and they only had the resources to expand so far — but, as more kids went through the system, they'd have more apprentices and junior members available to help with the teaching programme, so that was a problem that would naturally solve itself with time. The planned expansion did include multiple ramp-up phases as they went along, there might be occasional issues here and there, but it should mostly be manageable. Funding was going to be a little bit more of a problem, but given the economic importance and power of the guilds, and that they were investing in their own future, the guilds and some cooperative nobles should be able to patch up any gaps that came up. Sylvia said that the greatest economic advantage within their generation would be generated by an expansion of the craft guilds, so the most attention had been given to that part of the programme — they didn't anticipate any serious issues. Other than nonhumans being excluded, obviously that was still a problem...but a lot of the guilds could be shite about that anyway...
There were also going to be issues with primary schools — mostly, the funding was shite. In towns and stuff, there were already informal schoolhouses that the locals had started on their own, and the Ministry would be empowered to basically make those official, give them grants to pay for the salaries of full-time instructors. That part wasn't so bad...though, supplies were going to be a problem, and the Ministry was only authorised to set a curriculum for instruction in English and Cambrian. Naturally, why not take the opportunity of making a public education system to further annoy the Gaels, Liz was sure that wouldn't cause any problems down the road, it was fine. (There was already a primary programme at an Ollscoil, Sylvia said Gaelic schools would just copy the curriculum there, but it was still fucking stupid.) There were a few gaps that might come up, but getting primary school going in towns and villages shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Rural areas, though, were fucked. Large parts of the magical British economy was still dependent on agriculture, and they didn't have big machines and shite, so most agriculture was still done by hand — and so, the rural–urban population split in Britain was still far more rural-leaning than Liz had originally assumed. Even more weighted to rural areas if you included the indentured population, but even when you didn't, a surprisingly large fraction of the country still lived in tiny little farming or fishing villages, in some cases so small and isolated they didn't even have a public floo in convenient walking distance. In order to get primary education out there, the Ministry would probably have to build schoolhouses, and supply and staff them, without the pre-existing foundation they had in the cities. And then they'd have to figure out how kids were supposed to get there...
And that was assuming the Ministry wanted to put that much effort into funding them at all — why the hell would they care? what use did farmers have learning to read, anyway? They could just as easily decide, fuck it, and focus entirely on the more urban schools. The kids in rural communities were welcome to come, of course, it wasn't like they were barred from getting an education — they were legally guaranteed one if they wanted it — but the Ministry wasn't obligated to arrange transportation for them. They maintained the floo network for a reason, you know. If there was no public floo in your area, fine, just set up a private floo — which required a sufficiently sturdy building, under wards meeting these minimum specifications, and of course there was a perfectly reasonable fee...
Yeah, Liz suspect that, for a lot of children in the more rural villages, their right to an education was going to be mostly theoretical.
The programme sucked, basically, was what Liz was getting at. It was an improvement — which was a low fucking bar — and it was probably better in the long run for it to exist, so they could make successive improvements over the coming decades. But it was still terrible, inherently racist and terribly insufficient at actually reaching ordinary people, and the wand problem, hearing people talking about it all day Liz didn't entirely succeed in holding in an occasional scoff or a roll of her eyes. She did manage to mostly keep her mouth shut, but.
Sylvia agreed that Liz abstaining, or even voting against it, would make little difference — but she should try not to let how much she hated the act they'd come up with get out ahead of time. As much as Liz thought it was extremely stupid, the Girl Who Lived did have a certain cultural caché. Liz could admit that it was probably better for the act to pass than not, in the long term, and voting against it in the moment wasn't likely to change that, but people having time to reflect on why their super special national treasure thought it was horseshite might. After talking about it a little bit, they'd decided that Liz would either abstain or vote against it, depending on how annoyed she was feeling at the time, but it would be a surprise on the day, not advertised ahead of time. Sylvia might warn some other people in Ars Publica, just in case anyone else was considering protest votes, but.
And Liz herself would be doing it personally. For complicated cultural and politics reasons — also, she was over the age of contract, though technically not competent thanks to the trusteeship — there were certain big votes that it was a good idea for Liz herself to be seen making. Just to make it very clear that the vote was representing her opinion, and not Sylvia's, and also just to signal her personal position on stuff, it was a whole thing. Sylvia would be asking for a moment in the final statements just before the vote, to make sure people didn't make bad assumptions about why she wasn't voting for it, but that wouldn't be enough time to influence the vote itself — Liz and Sylvia were working on what exactly her statement would be, it should be finished well ahead of the date. Addressing the Wizengamot was going to be fucking awkward as hell, but whatever.
Some of the shite she and Sylvia were writing was kind of radical, honestly — Sylvia had had to go back and tone things down multiple times. If people hadn't suspected Liz was a neocommunalist already, they were definitely going to after her first real public political statement ever. She still didn't really think she was, necessarily, but...well, whatever.
Talk about the upcoming education vote pretty much dominated the conversation at school through the whole day, people were still talking about it during their study group meeting that evening. Liz mostly managed to keep her mouth shut about it. People had noticed pretty quickly that she was irritated, though they didn't always guess what about, since she could be kind of irritable sometimes, Liz being in a bad mood for no apparent reason wasn't exactly out of the ordinary. She did mention that it was fucking stupid that nymphs and wilderfolk had been excluded, and that the Ministry was only being ordered to set curricula in English and Cambrian — for both primary and craft school, but at least there were already Gaelic versions of the OWL and NEWT — which had kind of accidentally sparked a diversion about the current situation with the nationalists, oops. Everyone else was mostly focussed on that stuff, anyway.
Liz did think about it some, it'd be hard not to with everyone around her obsessing over it, but she was preoccupied with a more personal issue, intermittently over the course of the day. Trying to psych herself up for an intensely uncomfortable conversation with her best friend.
Of course, it'd be even more uncomfortable if Hermione actually agreed, but Liz was trying not to think about that part — if she got herself too nervous about it she'd never work up the nerve to even ask.
Their group had commandeered their usual corner of the library, tables dragged together. At some point Liz had started adding some privacy palings once they were all set up, so their chatter didn't bother anyone else — Pince had definitely noticed, but she hadn't said anything, she normally came by and noted them setting up here and moved on. The group was somewhat less tense these days than it'd been immediately after the winter break, as the hurt feelings between Susan and Hannah gradually cooled off, and now that Liz and Daphne were speaking again. She still wasn't talking to Dorea, of course — in case Liz needed more proof Daphne was a nicer person than her, she had no idea how she'd forgiven Liz so easily (it still hurt whenever she thought about it, feelings sucked) — but it was pretty easy to just sit on opposite ends of the big table and just not worry about it. Though, she could still feel it whenever Dorea looked it her, and sometimes she was weird about it, Liz was much better at acting like nothing was wrong...
(She had more practice — no one was supposed to know what went on at home, after all.)
Somehow, she'd ended up sitting with Padma and the Hufflepuff girls a lot, and she wasn't really sure how this had happened. She'd gotten on decently well with Padma for a while, sure — ever since she'd reacted positively to Liz being a parselmouth but hadn't really acted like it was a super big deal, ages ago now — but ever since Liz had started figuring out Seer stuff they'd been talking more. Padma actually knew Seers and Oracles and stuff back home, and was more familiar with how divination actually worked than most people around, and she was curious and had questions and stuff, so, they talked about that sometimes when they had nothing better to do. She was also generally just more comfortable to be around sometimes, since she was also familiar with how much being a Seer could suck, so, could be better about not pressing Liz about things, and giving her space and all. Liz wouldn't say they were especially close or anything, but it was comfortable, at least.
Liz was still kind of baffled about the Hufflepuff girls, she wasn't sure how that happened. She'd always gotten on with Susan, and now she was on the duelling team and all, but she really didn't like Hannah much, if she was being honest, and... With Sally-Anne and Sophie, she guessed, they were mostly just there, until they started rotating partners for Potions? She thought that was it. She'd thought it was just, you know, class stuff, at least for a bit, she'd honestly been a little taken aback by the girls acting all...seriously friendly and stuff, hadn't seen that coming.
She really could be terribly oblivious at times. In her defence, this having friends thing was still new to her, she wouldn't expect herself to be good at it. Or even really notice it was happening all the time...
The conversation over on their end of the table was, as was expected at this point, mostly about the education stuff. The muggleborns still hadn't gotten over how bloody absurd it was that magical Britain didn't already have a public education system, talk with the local purebloods about that, and with Padma about how it was other places — mixed, to say the least. Liz was pretty sure Sally-Anne and Sophie didn't realise how recent public education as a widespread phenomenon was, magical Britain was behind but not really that far behind, only by like fifty to a hundred years. A few ICW countries had been ahead of the curve, particularly Aquitania and Sicily — Aquitania had started ramping up universal public education as early as the 1870s, Sicily a few decades later around the turn of the century — and in the Union to their south and east, the Arab countries were mostly way ahead, most of them having started the process immediately after going into Secrecy (and in a couple cases arguably even before). Of course, a lot of that had started with religious and nationalistic motivations — back in the Middle Ages Muslim countries tended to be more literate than Christian ones, for complicated religion- and culture-related reasons, and coming through Secrecy the leadership thought it was important to build a common identity to keep the new magical countries together, so a lot of the early educational materials had been religious and/or political propaganda — but that'd been an easy jumping-off point to universal secular education, a large part of why the enchanting and alchemy in the Arab world was so advanced.
In her private study, Liz was learning that a lot of modern alchemy in Europe was actually based on developments imported from Egypt and the Levant staring in the 19th Century, often explicitly just translations of Arabic or Kemetic publications — which Hermione said was fair enough, since the foundation of Western maths and science was built on translations of mediaeval Arabic texts, so. Liz had actually had no idea about that until Hermione had first mentioned it at some point last year, somehow it'd never come up in primary school.
(Probably for racist reasons — a lot of things turned out to be for racist reasons, when she looked into it.)
Anyway, the Americas also tended to have pretty good public education systems, dating back a couple hundred years already — given the European invasions and the subsequent war to enforce Secrecy, they'd basically been rebuilding their societies from scratch, so they'd decided they might as well get it right on the first try. Other regions tended to be more mixed, depending very much on local culture and recent history. Highly agricultural societies tended to be slower, more urban societies quicker, countries with mixed economies showing uneven development. Magical China, for example, had a very highly-developed education system in the cities and towns, but practically nothing at all in the more sparsely-populated agricultural areas. (A lot of people were even completely illiterate, which Liz thought was perfectly understandable, written Chinese looked hard.) The Marathis had a set-up pretty similar to the Chinese, with a lot of more advanced academia and crafts and stuff in the cities and less developed agricultural areas — Padma said illiteracy was pretty common in rural villages, most people who did learn to read were homeschooled or associated with the temples somehow. Padma and Parvati had gone to a primary school back there, but it was a special super fancy private school, not one of the public ones. (That was actually where she'd learned English, a lot of the upper class in the magical states of India spoke English these days, to smooth over diplomacy with the muggle government.) A couple of the other kids at the table spent a bit just blinking at Padma as she described what her primary school was like — a lot of their friends tended to forget that the Patils were actually an absurdly wealthy politically important family back home, which was silly of them, the whole reason they were here was to build personal and business ties with the British nobility so they could expand their influence into Europe and get even more wealthy and important, but whatever...
(Mostly somewhat racist assumptions brought over from the muggle world, Liz assumed, but she didn't make a point of calling them on it.)
When they did talk about academic stuff — you know, what the study group was for — Liz was honestly lost half of the time. She'd mostly been focussed on her own Competency study, and she had the excuse of the Tournament, so she'd kind of been...lapsing into not paying attention to her proper classes much. She still knew what was going on in Potions — she liked Potions, and the curricula weren't that different — and in Charms — honestly, mostly just because she planned on asking Flitwick for a recommendation letter when she started applying to schools — but especially in classes that she had no particular reason to pay attention to, she'd kind of lost track of what they were doing. She was failing in her role as their Defence expert, in a way — she was honestly way ahead of the material they were learning, thanks to her duelling practice and her own study, but that was actually less than helpful sometimes, since she'd completely forgotten what topics they were working on in class, or what the 'correct' answers were that Ollerton would expect. Oops?
She got halfway through explaining how the stripping hex worked, and how it interacted with shields and enchanted objects, which might or might not influence where you wanted to aim it or whether you wanted to just use a stunning hex instead, when Susan reminded her that they were working on the basic stripping hex, not the layered one they were all taught in the duelling team. Shite, um, just don't listen to her, she guessed, she didn't know what they were doing...
Liz spent the whole study group meeting slowly poking away at a Potions essay, half-listening to the education talk, and making an idiot of herself discussing the completely wrong hex, trying not to think about what she was about to do, twitching with tension. She didn't get much work done, honestly, it was annoyingly difficult to focus. This was going to be so unbelievably awkward...
The windows gone dark, they were starting to wrap up, even less academic talk going on than there had been for the rest of the evening — she wasn't the only one who hadn't gotten much work done — flittering off on politics or gossip or whatever. Liz's heart progressively crawled up her throat, her stomach churning, as the group gradually called it a day, packing things away, moving to break up their tables and privacy charms...
Liz had gotten off her feet to help with the tables, her skin practically crawling and her heartbeat pounding in her fingertips. Once her table was moved back into its spot, she circled around the group toward Hermione — she'd been sitting closer to Dorea today, they hadn't talked much. (Hermione split her time between Liz and Dorea, trying to be fair, because she could be silly like that.) Lily and Dorea both noticed Liz was coming before Hermione did, but Liz was coming up behind her, so. "Hey, Hermione?" She glanced over her shoulder, giving Liz a raised eyebrow. "Can we talk for a minute?" she asked, gesturing vaguely deeper into the bookshelves.
Hermione frowned, just a little — somehow, she'd immediately picked up on Liz's nervousness, a little trickle of concern spreading through her clockwork mind. "Oh, sure. Just give me a second here..."
Once Hermione had gathered her things together, they started off, Liz grabbing her bag on the way. On the other side of the theory section was a little nook by the windows with a couple chairs — Hermione flopped down into one, but Liz just dropped her bag and stayed standing, trying not to fidget. Now she actually had to have this conversation, and she suddenly found her mind a big fuzzy blank, how the hell was she even supposed to start?
Hermione waited a moment for her to say something, but it quickly became obvious Liz was floundering. "So, how's your Competency study going? I assume that's why you got the Defence material wrong, you've been focussed on that."
"Oh, yeah, um. Fine, I guess? I think I'm actually a little ahead of schedule, but that's probably better than being behind. I'm mostly caught up with the third-year material in everything, and I have until winter to get through the fourth year, so. Should be fine."
"Good, good. Kind of lucky this whole Tournament business happened, when you think about it — I expect you would have had far less free time to study what you wanted if you had to keep up with your Hogwarts schoolwork at the same time."
Liz shrugged — she'd had the same thought. "I plan on taking the OWLs too, so I will have to catch back up at some point. I shouldn't have any trouble with the practicals, but the theory exams might be a bit spotty at points..."
"I think I can tweak the notebook enchantment to duplicate my notes, and I'll help you revise. We should manage okay."
Not really sure what else to say, Liz just nodded. And then their little corner fell into a thick, awkward silence, the seconds dragging by — her stomach squirming, Hermione's attention on her warm and prickly, her skin crawling.
"...So, what is this about? Is something wrong?"
"No, it's..." Liz realised she was fidgeting with the end of her scarf, forced herself to stop. Her breath coming out in a long sigh, she said, "I need your help with something, but it's, kind of..." Her wand falling into her hand, Liz cast a quick series of palings. "...you know, private."
"All right. I'm listening," she added, when Liz didn't start right away.
"It's a little hard to..." Mentally running through the list of points she had to get to, Liz grimaced. "Ah, just to be very clear, this isn't me, um, coming on to you are anything. It's not anything like that, okay."
Both of Hermione's eyebrows arced up — rather loudly wondering what kind of thing this was, if Liz was concerned Hermione might get that impression. Of course, Hermione's mind was super busy and active, and went on funny tangents very quickly. Liz making that clear was making Hermione wonder what Liz 'coming on to' her would be like — she'd only been asked out once, and hadn't even noticed at the time — and then wondering what her reaction would be if Liz did ask her out — she'd have to think about it, balancing her own curiosity and why not try it impulse with concern it would mess up their friendship, which Liz was a little taken aback by, honestly — and then wondering if kissing Liz (or some other girl) would feel substantively different than kissing Neville — which they'd only done a handful of times, and they had already broken up now (Liz had called that one) — because she hadn't really been particularly moved by it, but she really had no idea if that was because she wasn't attracted to boys or just Neville in particular or anyone at all, even, how were you supposed to tell? and she should probably try to figure that out at some point, but it wasn't like it was urgent, she was still only fifteen, she had time, and also asking her friends to help her collect data would probably be an odd thing to do, she wouldn't want to—
Hermione's mind smoothed over, cool and solid as ice, as she belatedly realised Liz was there. Flinching, Liz said, "Sorry, slipped."
"It's all right." Since occlumency didn't really block people's feelings very well — supposedly that was actually a Seer thing, so it wouldn't — Liz could tell Hermione meant that, even with her actual thoughts blocked off. She seemed maybe a little embarrassed, but not actually annoyed. "You were saying?"
"Right, um." Liz took a long, slow breath in and out. She really wished she could have taken a sip of calming potion for this, or one of her tablets... Actually, she probably could have? She was supposed to avoid drugs when doing the exposure stuff itself, but there was no reason she couldn't have just talking to Hermione about it. Oh well, too late now. "You know, when I came to your house to do the heritage test thing, I told you about what happened with Daphne."
A little flicker of surprise and a swirl of confusion, Hermione just blinked at her for a second. Her occlumency had relaxed as the moment passed — she didn't bother keeping it up all the time, just when she was thinking something private she didn't want Liz peeking at — so Liz could tell she did know what she was referring to, thankfully. "Of course."
"Yeah, it... I kind of got a slap in the face a bit ago, the context of it isn't really important, and it occurred to me that my problems aren't going to just go away on their own, if I don't do anything about them. I can be kind of bad about that, you know."
Hermione was very much aware, yes, but she tactfully didn't say anything.
"I talked to Clara about it, back when I went to see her on Valentine's Day—"
"Oh, is that where you went? I did wonder about that." All of her friends had thought Liz leaving the school on Valentine's Day was odd, especially since she'd been being rather nervous and furtive about it, but Hermione hadn't wanted to press her about it. Because some of her friends were considerate like that, Tracey. "Are you two...?"
"No, no, just, we both had the day off, and I asked her for advice dealing with my...stuff, and she wanted to talk about it in person, so. Ah. She also gave me advice about dealing with Seer stuff — that bit of advice I didn't actually ask for, but she can be nosey like that. That's why I started getting more psychometrically-neutral food made special, her idea."
"Well, that's good, then." It bothered her sometimes, a little, that Hermione had no idea who Liz's penfriend was, but if she was helping her like that, she guessed she approved. Hermione was actually a little irritated with herself in retrospect that it'd never occurred to her to suggest something like that — she hadn't known what options there were available, so it hadn't seemed immediately obvious, but there were other Seers around, certainly there would be something...
"Yeah. Honestly, I'm already sleeping better, it's weird." Also, with Nilanse specifically planning her meals with her pickiness in mind, she probably didn't even need the nutrient potion anymore. Though it's not like it would hurt her to keep taking it, so whatever. "I didn't ask for that advice, the thing we were there to... She calls it exposure therapy, she says it's a muggle term, if you know that?"
"I've heard of it, what— Oh!" abruptly cutting herself off, as Hermione realised what Liz was talking about.
But she wasn't entirely sure what Liz was trying to ask her for help with, so she still had explaining to do. "It's, ah... I can be really neurotic about...body-related stuff, you know. For reasons I'm sure you can guess." Hermione, in fact, could guess — she had caught that one nightmare at the World Cup. "Clara said I should, just, try to get used to...not having clothes on. So I don't blow up into a panicky mess the next time I get in a situation like that, you know. Or honestly just make it less uncomfortable to exist sometimes, I can be pointlessly stupid about..." She gestured vaguely at herself. "...just in general. Liz is broken issues, you know."
"Yes, I, well, that's probably not a bad idea, in the long run. As long as you're careful not to push yourself too hard."
"Yeah, Clara warned me about that. I've already been working on it on my own, you know, ever since Valentine's Day, just..." Liz could feel the discomfort sizzling through her, her face warm, she forced out a sigh, folded her arms over her stomach. "...you know, be naked more, which is just kind of..." Not really sure what to say Liz forced an awkward little shiver. "I'm working on it."
"Good, good." Her eyes flicking to the side (Liz relaxing slightly at her attention slipping off of her), Hermione hesitated for a second. "Ah, what did you want my help with, exactly?"
Liz grimaced — and here was the seriously awkward part. "Clara said, ah, I should work on it by myself, but, it's not just when I'm alone that... Once I was more comfortable doing it on my own, that I should try it with another person, someone I trust not to...you know, be shitty about it, and make it worse. So, er, don't take this the wrong way, I'm seriously not trying to be a perv. But, I was wondering if we could...have a bath? You know."
There was a funny little flicker in Hermione's head, Liz wasn't sure how to read that, and it really was peculiar how very uncomfortable and unconfident Liz was being, she was— "Okay."
Distracted following the quick steady ticking of Hermione's thoughts, Liz was a little taken aback. She just blinked at Hermione like an idiot, she only noticed her mouth was hanging open slightly from catching Hermione noticing it, she... Just, okay? That was it?
"Does right now work? I meant to have a shower before bed anyway, and we should still have some time before curfew."
...Er.
It took a moment for Liz to find her voice. "Yeah. Um. Now is fine."
"Great. Where were we going? There are public toilets, of course, but I don't know where there are any public baths. At least not any we can use." Without potentially being walked in on, anyway.
"...I was thinking Slytherin. Our bathroom has... It should work."
"I was concerned they might bother you about it later, if we're seen together down there."
Liz shrugged. "Concealment spells exist. Also, mind magic. I should be able to get you in and out without anyone noticing."
"Right. I'll need to go up to Gryffindor to get my shower things. Where should I meet you?"
...So she really meant right now right now. Um, okay then...
Instead of telling Hermione where to go to meet her, Liz just followed her out of the library, up the Grand Staircase toward Gryffindor. The guardian portrait chided Hermione for speaking the password with a Slytherin right there, which was ridiculous — Liz was a mind mage, a bloody password wasn't going to keep her out. (She hadn't already known what it was, but it hardly mattered.) She also wouldn't open the door with Liz there, she rolled her eyes and retreated down to the nearest corner to wait.
Liz had been let into the Gryffindor dorms, before — she suspected she'd been blacklisted. Probably after the incident capturing Pettigrew...
Standing there waiting, Liz had enough time alone with her thoughts for the anxiety to build, churning in her stomach and crackling over her shoulders and her back. Hermione reappeared before too long, thankfully. Liz led the way downstairs, toward the professors' offices on the fourth floor. Hermione could tell she was nervous, so she decided to fill the air with random babble about what they were doing in Arithmancy, and pointedly not looking at Liz — her eyes flicked back to Liz every once in a while (crawling on her skin like ants), but just to keep track of where she was and what direction they were going, most of the time looking around the hall or over the portraits they were passing. It was common knowledge now that she could feel it when people looked at her — she'd mentioned it at the Weighing of the Wands, and a couple of her friends had asked since what it was like — but most of them didn't make an effort to... It was thoughtful of her, that was all.
Liz hissed «open» at a snake curled up sleeping under a bush in a painting of some fancy-looking people having some kind of meeting out in a courtyard somewhere, the frame unlatching from the wall with an audible click. There was a flash of mixed fascination and irritation from Hermione — literally the first time Hermione had ever spoken to Liz was to ask about Parseltongue, and she hadn't stopped finding it interesting since, but she was also still annoyed that there were shortcuts stitched through the castle only Liz could use — she let out a little oh! as the shadowy passage beyond showed itself. "Is this one of the ones that comes out of Slytherin? Millie mentioned them, but I thought they were only one-way exits."
"This one doesn't go all the way into Slytherin, but there's a secret passage in the secret passage that does." Standing on the threshold, Liz concentrated for a blink, cast a little floating ball of yellowish light with a flick of her fingers. "The exits can be hard to find sometimes — they move — and they're sealed from the outside with Parseltongue."
"Ah, of course, I shouldn't have expected otherwise."
Liz waved Hermione inside, shuffled past her in the narrow space back to the entrance. "Well, they have to be sealed somehow — the other end brings you right inside Slytherin, past the security at the door."
"I suppose that's true."
After tugging the 'door' closed and making sure it was latched — there was no point in having a secret, magically-sealed door if it was left hanging open — the light in the passage suddenly grew brighter. Twitching, Liz glanced over her shoulder to see a blueish ball of light floating over Hermione's head, just like the little lights Liz had been playing around casting wandlessly since last year. "Oh! You got that out really smoothly, good job."
Hermione grinned at her, mind warm and thick and tingly, teeth glimmering a little in the mixed blue-yellow light — she'd been practising her wandless magic ever since the summer, she was very pleased with herself for managing it. "Thanks. Not as quick at it as you, and I can only do a few little things, but I'm still working on it."
"Yeah, well, I'm a cheater. I've been doing wandless magic since I was, like, eight, you know — Nilanse claims mind magic counts."
"True. So, lead the way?"
There was only one way to go, but Hermione wouldn't recognise the turn-off to Slytherin, so, Liz squeezed past her and started off in the lead again, tweaking her light a little to send it shining more directly forward. Hermione let out a low little oooh — Liz could feel her tinkering with her light spell back there, she accidentally put it out twice trying to get it to do what she wanted. There was an edge of building frustration in her head, like when she was working on an Arithmancy problem she couldn't quite get to work out the way she wanted, determination to get the damn thing to work, dammit...
Liz would give her advice, but honestly she had no idea how she did this sort of thing. She just did.
The door was extremely subtle, just a faint shimmer of colour over the stone of the wall on the left. She had no idea if anyone else would be able to see it at all — it was possible it was a mind mage or Seer thing, how some concealment spells didn't work on her properly, the same way she was never fooled by fake doors or the like. It activated with another hiss of «open,» the stone fading translucent before just disappearing. Liz grabbed Hermione's hand and pulled her through, the stone blinking back into existence once they were on the other side — she'd made that mistake taking Daphne through the tunnels once, some of these doors closed the instant the person who'd opened them passed through. This passage was somewhat rougher than the previous, the corners rounded, slowly curving to the left and dropping at a shallow but noticeable incline, before reaching a tight spiral stair, the handrail polished (conjured) silver, stylized snakes curled around the bars. The stairs went down, down, bright light stabbed into the passage as one turn brought them over the Grand Staircase around the third floor or so, another turn on the upper level of a gallery overlooking the cliffs — Liz had checked both spots out of curiosity, the stairs were completely undetectable from the outside — before dropping into darkness again as they reached ground level, turning around again and again...
The moody light of the Slytherin dorms came upon them from below, and the stairs dropped them right into one of the circular junctions. Liz glanced up at the signs over the other passages out, just in case. The passages down here moved way more often than you'd expect — she had a feeling all this was actually some kind of anchored conjuration in expanded space, the physical dimensions even more suggestible than most places in the castle — and this staircase wasn't in the same spot Liz remembered, but that passage led to the third-year girls' rooms, okay. Liz quick cast an attention-diverting paling over Hermione before setting off. There were a couple people in the third-year girls' circle, it looked like one had been leaving the bathroom and other going toward, bumped into each other and paused to chat. They both recognised her, but Liz was infamously shite with names, so she had no idea who one of them was — the other girl was Artaimís, though. Or, Miné, she guessed, since they were in Slytherin at the moment? Liz didn't really think of the Muircheartaigh triplets as separate people — which was fair enough, since they didn't either — but she tried to remember to use the name she was expected to.
She'd be lying if she said she hadn't slipped and accidentally called Miné Artaimís, several times when they'd just bumped into each other in Slytherin. It didn't really offend Miné or anything — she was, after all, the same person, just wearing a Slytherin uniform instead of a Gryffindor one — but tended to remind the other people around that the Muircheartaigh triplets were still soul-bonded, which normal people thought was weird and uncomfortable, it could be a little tedious...
After a brief talk about the Tournament — Miné had heard the next Task was a quidditch tournament, if Liz was still looking she could ask around to check who Cedric was recruiting and who might be available (completely unnecessary, she'd put her whole team together within a week of Dumbledore telling her about the Task) — they continued on, Liz steering them into the passage leading toward the fourth years' circle. There wasn't anyone standing out here, though Daphne's door was hanging open, she heard voices from in there — Tracey and Millie, she thought, chatting before bed. Liz quick dipped into her room to grab her bath bag, and a fresh vest and pair of knickers.
Linen knickers, even, mage-made, some of the special psychometrically-clean linen she'd been looking into lately. She was working on eliminating the cotton, but she'd had mixed success so far — just hanging out in her room alone, she could normally tolerate the linen, but she didn't like wearing them out in public. (Felt exposed, which was fucking ridiculous, because she was still fully dressed...) The pair she was wearing right now were her usual muggle-made cotton, actually, still needed the familiar thing to get through classes and stuff. Her plan tonight was actually to attempt sleeping naked — though, if she was still worked up from the bath she was probably going to have to put it off for another night — and she was going to try to go as long as she could without switching back to the cotton knickers, but she was honestly sceptical of her ability to make it all the way through classes.
Tamsyn said she was actually making pretty good progress, but it sure felt aggravatingly slow. Being so pointlessly neurotic about her own damn body was just annoying. Mostly she'd avoided thinking about it, which wasn't really an option these days, since she was trying to fix it...
Anyway, she led Hermione into the bathroom — she came through the wards just fine, without Liz having to give her a hand across, still registered as a guest from when she'd stayed over at the end of last year. The sinks on the right, they turned to the left, down a narrow little hall. All the doors were hanging open, nobody in here at the moment. Past the toilets, the first two doors led to showers, the second two to baths...though they were rather small baths. Well bigger than a standard muggle bathtub, she thought, and she knew Daphne and Tracey regularly bathed together in these...but they were also extremely comfortable with each other, having spent a lot of their time together growing up, practically sisters. (And the Greenwood could be the Greenwood about this sort of thing.) At the end of the little hall was a door into the larger, group bath, practically a small pool or like a jacuzzi or something, which Liz had kind of thought would be the better idea...but then, nobody ever used the thing. If one of the normal bath doors were closed, nobody would give that a second thought, but if this door was closed — and locked, there wasn't actually a lock on it (it wasn't supposed to be private), Liz would have to do it with charms — someone might wonder what was up with that...and might notice Liz leaving, and wonder what the hell she'd been doing in there.
...
As awkward as it would undoubtedly be, the private baths were probably a better idea — she suddenly lurched to the right through a door, waiting for Hermione to pass through after her before closing it, clicking the lock. Like the shower rooms, the space was kind of split in half. One side had a long counter with a sink and a mirror all along the wall, the setup more or less identical to the shower rooms, the bathing area itself on the other side. It wasn't really a separate tub, exactly, so much as the floor tiles seemed to just rise up into the proper shape, the bath built into the floor. The inside surface was smooth ceramic on the sides, textured a little bit on the bottom, to prevent slips — Liz found it somewhat uncomfortable to sit on, but mostly just because it drew her attention in a way that was bad for neurotic reasons.
Of course, now they just had to...do the bath part. Liz was practically vibrating from nerves (eyes on her skin crawling like ants), this was going to be bloody miserable...
"I am a little jealous," Hermione said — unexpectedly, Liz twitched a little. "I've seen the bathrooms in all four dorms now, and Slytherin and Hufflepuff's are so much nicer than Gryffindor or Ravenclaw's. I guess there's simply more available space underground, even with space-manipulation spells the towers are more restrictive."
Liz hadn't seen Gryffindor's, but she had seen Ravenclaw's, and she guessed there was a point to that. She didn't know if Slytherin's were necessarily nicer — somewhat different aesthetics, and the windows in Ravenclaw's made her nervous (even though she'd flown up to the Tower to check, and they were just illusions, nobody could see in) — but there was more room in the Slytherin bathrooms, felt less cramped. "It's not even ready yet."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, um." Liz dropped her change of clothes on the counter, brought her bath bag over to rest on the rim of the tub, near the controls. With a tap, the barrier separating the halves of the room snapped into existence — she felt Hermione behind her testing it, but the shimmery blue wall only held in the air, people could go through it just fine — another tap and a thin cloud of steam started oozing out of the tiles overhead. "You like oranges and clove? For scents."
"Er, yes, those are fine." Hermione didn't like eating oranges, all the weird fibrous gunk all over on the inside, but she liked the smell well enough.
Liz locked in the dial, and turned it on. She wouldn't actually be able to smell it until the steam got down here, but it was working, so. Glancing over her shoulder, mm, the steam was maybe a little thin, she turned it up some, then turned back to her bath bag, pulled it open. She'd been accumulating bath stuff, mostly to serve as distractions, so she wasn't just sitting naked in the water, something else to pay attention to. A flick of her fingers closed the drain, she scooped a measure of crystalline sand-looking stuff out of a jar and dropped it into the tub. That would froth up into bubbles as it dissolved into the water — she'd been playing around with that sort of thing already, but she thought it was an especially good idea if there was going to be someone else in here with her. Liz took out two handfuls of long, narrow candles and set them on the rim, lit them all with a wide wave of her hand and a crackle of wandless magic. They didn't all burn the normal flame-yellow, but a whole rainbow of colours, orange and blue and green and violet, which was very neat. (Some potion mixed into the wax, she assumed.) A flick of her wrist to draw her wand, she cast a scaled down bubblehead charm around the top of each candle, individually, to keep the steam away from the wick — the cloud was finally starting to get down this far, soft and warm and citrus-sweet and tingly from spice — levitated them up in a circle above and around the tub, suspended in the air with the same charm she used to float books and stuff. She'd done this before, Liz's charms were powerful enough that they'd stay in place more than long enough to get through a bath — though the bubblehead charms were more iffy, sometimes she'd lose some of the candles, but that wasn't a big deal.
With a little warm flutter of amusement, Hermione said, "Very nice. Do you go through this much effort every time, or is this just for me?"
Liz could feel the heat on her face, her stomach twisting, but she forced herself to roll her eyes, trying to act casual. "I'm a bloody mess, remember? The more distractions to keep me from thinking about what I'm doing, the better. I normally read a book in here too."
"Ah...I don't know if I could do that myself."
Worried about getting the pages wet, she meant — Hermione could be very protective of her books. "I looked up a charm to shield the paper, I can teach it to you later. Go ahead and set the water wherever you like, the dial is right there. I suspect I'd prefer toward the hotter end of whatever you're comfortable with, because I'm tiny, cold all the bloody time." While Hermione started fiddling with that, Liz took the things she'd actually need out of her bag, setting them along the rim, before slipping back through the wards, setting the mostly-empty bag on the counter. It was just normal cloth, after all, didn't want to accidentally get the thing mouldy or something. She heard the water start running, a little surprised oh! from Hermione as the bubbles started showing themselves...
Liz took a second to breathe, standing in front of the mirror, her hands tight on the lip of the counter. The only prep thing left was actually undressing. Piece of cake.
(She could see her hands shaking, her breath tight and hot in her throat.)
She'd only managed to get her boots and her uniform robe off when Hermione reappeared, moving to hang her own robe up on the wall. She was in denims and a tee shirt, pretty normal for her at this time of year. (Unlike Katie, Hermione would wear a skirt if the occasion called for it, but she only rarely did when she wasn't dressing up for something.) "The water will cut itself off when the tub is full, right? Like in Gryffindor." She plopped down onto the tile and started rolling up the legs of her trousers, so she could get at the laces of her boots — when they'd started school, Hermione had worn muggle Mary Janes, but she'd switched to magical-made boots at some point between now and then.
"Yeah."
Hermione was very quick at getting her shoes and socks off — Liz suspected she'd used wandless magic to untie them — before long was popping back up into view in the mirror next to Liz. "That's nice," she said, nodding at Liz's dress through the mirror. "Is that new?"
It took a second for Liz to find her voice, her tongue dry and stiff. "Yeah, ordered it a couple weeks ago. Trying to cut out cotton, you know." And muggle stuff in general, honestly, a lot of extremely shitty labour stuff when into the production of clothing. The dress was linen, dyed a pleasant sky-blue, embroidered with chains of flowers in yellow and blue and red along the hems, in a stripe from the bottom of her ribs on her left side all the way down the skirt to the floor. (There was an opening in the skirt there, but it wasn't super obvious, the skirt something like four-hundred fifty degrees around.) The skirt was pretty loose and drapey, but the top laced up the side (opposite the row of flowers) with a red ribbon, tightening snug from her hips to her clavicles. The linen was thick enough that, with the layer underneath, she could barely tell she was lopsided — still enough that she wouldn't be comfortable wearing this in public, though.
The dress was somewhat plain by magical standards, really, but more expensive than it looked. The options for sellers that specifically tried to make psychometrically-pleasant clothing were somewhat limited, driving the prices up — more than they would be anyway, that is. For the most sensitive Seers, it was preferable for the linen to be grown on land that was ritually cleansed to strip way any lingering echoes of death or violence (normally with ritual sex magic, turned out), and the farm workers had to be well-compensated and reasonably content with life (sourcing from tightly-knit communes or even monasteries or whatever was standard), and all the work that went into making the thread and the cloth and finally the dress itself also had to be well-compensated, preferably someone who had a legitimate interest in doing it, not just as a job to make a living. And those rules had to be followed not just for the linen itself, but also the dyes. There were suitable suppliers and manufacturers — Liz was hardly the only Seer in the world, after all — just all the methods people used to mass-produce stuff and cut down costs had psychometric effects, meaning clean clothes were more expensive just at baseline, even without doing anything fancy.
Totally worth it, though. Liz was fucking drowning in gold, so the elevated price hardly mattered, and the fabric felt warm and smooth and vaguely tingly against her skin. In a pleasant way, she meant, it was surprisingly comfortable. She suspected they'd actually managed to get positive psychometric echoes into it, which was a neat trick — she'd made a note of the particular people she'd bought it from, for future reference.
"Well, it's nice." Hermione pulled her shirt over her head, dropped it onto the floor against the wall under her hanging robe — Liz assumed there must be a change of clothes in her bag. Under the shirt she had what Liz recognised as a mage-made bustier, which Hermione had mentioned at some point she thought were more comfortable than muggle-made bras. (Hermione had come home from Christmas break way back in second year with bras added to her wardrobe, because she was the oldest student in their year, and her tits were kind of super obvious.) The stiffened linen looked very similar to the ones Tamsyn had worn back in the early 40s that Liz had caught in a couple of memories she'd sent, the style hadn't changed much over the decades, though rather more plain, without the lace accents and stuff — presumably, Tamsyn's had been gifts from her friend Julie or whoever else, Hermione's more basic than what nobles would get. Her fingers working at the close of her trousers, Hermione said, "I have always liked your dress sense. Maybe a little peculiar at times, but that's what makes it interesting, you know?" Hermione rolled the waist of her denims over her hips, and—
Her knickers went down with her trousers, Hermione stepped out of them one foot at a time, kicking them over by her shirt. Um.
She'd known they'd both be taking their clothes off, obviously, not like it was unexpected she'd be seeing Hermione naked today. Not even for the first time, actually — when Hermione had been staying over at hers in August she'd been rather less than careful about making sure Liz didn't catch her while she was, ah, indecent. It was still...a little startling, was all.
It occurred to Liz that she probably shouldn't be looking, try not to be a creep, but she couldn't help it. There wasn't even a whole lot to see, at the angle Liz had through the mirror, enough hair down there that the...um, details were mostly hidden. Still.
"Not the most fashionable girl around, but it's..." Hermione trailed off, partially trying to find the words, and partially working at unlacing the bustier — there was some enchantment that did it automatically, like some of Liz's clothes, but she had to reach around to trigger it. The bustier loosened enough Hermione could pull it over her head, her impossible hair floofing around, reached over it to hang it on a hook between their robes. She turned back to smile at Liz through the mirror...completely naked, and seemingly unconcerned about that. "Well, it's very you, I guess." Without waiting for a response, she turned and started padding back over to the bath. "Sounds like the water's stopped already — that must be magic, how quickly they fill up..."
"...Yeah." Liz had turned to watch her walk away, then belatedly realised she was staring at Hermione's arse, wrenched herself back forward to meet her own eyes in the mirror. She forced a long, deep, shaky breath, trying to calm down. Not that she was quite as nervous as she'd been a minute ago, but being distracted because she was staring at her best friend's naked body like a fucking creep didn't exactly make this less uncomfortable.
It had occurred to Liz that that might be a problem too — because she was a bloody perv sometimes, it would be difficult for her to come up with a girl at school she spent any significant amount of time around who she hadn't had sexy thoughts about at some— Oh, Pansy and Selwyn, that was easy, never mind. Still, point stands. Somewhat frustratingly, at least from what Liz had noticed that possibility hadn't occurred to Hermione, she could hear her thoughts over there, assuming Liz being all quiet and stiff and shaky was still entirely due to PTSD-related horseshite. Because Hermione was unreasonably convinced she was fat and gross — she was a little overweight, could definitely tell around her thighs and under her arms, but it wasn't that bad — that Liz might think she was kind of distracting wasn't even on her radar, which was fucking ridiculous, honestly...
(Liz would say it was possible she was just a massive perv, but she knew from catching other people's thoughts that she was hardly the only person who found Hermione attractive, Hermione herself was just oblivious about it for no apparent reason.)
But, she would, just, try to act normal. She'd gotten plenty of practice at that, honestly — she hadn't stopped getting distractingly turned on at inconvenient times, she'd just gotten more used to managing it and not drawing attention to herself. Just as she was getting better at not being pointlessly neurotic about being less than fully dressed, which was really the only reason she could even consider doing this at all. And she did manage to loosen the laces holding her dress closed, hang it up next to her robe (the linen could wrinkle easily, it didn't like being dropped on the floor). She undid the knot on her shorts, but the feel of the waist loosening had a sudden cold spike of dread lancing through her — leaning against the counter with one hand, the other holding her shorts in place, she took a few long, deep breaths, glaring at herself in the mirror.
This was so fucking stupid, why was she like this? It's not like she thought Hermione was going to do anything to her (she hadn't even seen Vernon in years), or even really say anything off, honestly, she was fine...
Liz twitched when Hermione unexpectedly spoke. "I can't really see you through the barrier, but my back is turned anyway."
"...I know." She would feel Hermione's attention on her, so. Of course, Hermione knew that, she was just trying to help.
She heard some lapping of water, Hermione getting into the bath. Or maybe just moving around — it was possible she'd already gotten into the water, and Liz had missed it while she was trying not to freak out like a crazy person. "Would it help to turn the lights off? The candles are going to be pretty dim, and we can always cast light charms if we need it."
Liz blinked at her reflection — that possibility hadn't even occurred to her. She felt like such an idiot, that should have been obvious. "Can't hurt. Ready?"
"Sure, go ahead."
"Noctēscat." The lights winked out, plunging the room into darkness. Not total darkness, she noticed as her eyes adjusted — she couldn't see the colour of the candles at all from here, but the barrier splitting the room in half was also giving off a faint, steady blue-white light. It was pretty subtle, though, Liz could barely see herself in the mirror, just a vague shadowy silhouette, framed by the glow of the barrier behind her. It should be brighter on the other side of the barrier, but probably not by a lot, this was...better.
At the very least, it was very dark here now, there was absolutely no chance Hermione could make out anything past the glare of the barrier itself, it was much easier to convince herself she was alone. (She could still feel Hermione's mind, if somewhat muffled by the barrier, but she pretended not to.) She loosened her grip on the counter and her shorts, slipping down her legs to the floor as she let go. The movement a little stiff and jerky, she managed to get her vest over her head. She hesitated for a moment with her thumbs hooked into the waistband of her pants, breathing a little shakily, nerves crackling over her skin so intensely she almost thought she could hear it, a faint background hiss in her head, her fingers twitching. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to push them down.
(Feeling the cotton brush down her thighs, there was a very brief flash of the Dursleys' sitting room, the fabric of the sofa scratching against her chest, but she stubbornly pushed past it and it quickly faded.)
Once she had them off, she bent down to tuck the knickers into her shorts, bundled up with the vest, to be thrown in the laundry when they got out. The thought had occurred to her that Hermione might spot her knickers laid out on the floor when they left the bath, which would be embarrassing, which was an extremely silly thought, because she was completely naked right now, and in a few seconds would be getting into the bath with Hermione, and who knew how long they'd be sitting in the water completely naked, but Liz's brain just did shite like that sometimes.
With a little lurch, she remembered Severus spotting her knickers those couple times he came to her hotel room over the summer, face warming and stomach squirming with a flash of retroactive embarrassment, again, that was years ago now, for fuck's sake...
Liz hesitated for a second, a step away from the barrier. Her stupid pale skin almost seemed to faintly glow, this close to the barrier, but she was positive Hermione wouldn't be able to see her at all from the other side. She wondered how reasonable it would be to get the blood alchemist to change her skin tone, as long as she was at it — Severus had set an appointment with someone, they'd be seeing her at the beginning of April, the weekend after the Sixth Task. (The beginning of spring break, only a couple weeks away now.) It's not that the colour bothered her, really — honestly, she thought the effect when paired with dark, vibrantly-dyed clothes could be pretty neat — it was just fucking frustrating how careful she had to be about sun exposure. She burned so quickly, and never got a tan at all. The burns weren't difficult to deal with, some basic topical potions cleared it right up, it was just a pain...
Oh wait, she'd seen her future self, almost forgot. She'd been paying more attention to the new hair colour, and actually having tits (and she'd really liked that dress, to the point she was kind of looking forward to wearing it, which was such a silly girly thought), and she would have used make-up and/or cosmetic charms for the fancy party she was at, so... She thought she might have seemed less unmanageably pale, but it was hard to say.
But that thought was a good distraction! Firmly thinking about what she'd talk with the blood alchemist about — she knew from that glimpse crystal-gazing that she'd fix her scars and change her hair, and her eye colour and the general features of her face would stay the same, but everything beyond that was still fair game — Liz stepped through the barrier. It was a little brighter on the other side, the candles illuminating patches of the mist in colourful little blobs — a neat effect when the lights were on, but honestly even cooler when they were out. She might have to start doing this for her own baths, just for aesthetic reasons. The mist was kind of absorbing most of the light, giving the air a faint glow, the features of the room mostly hidden in murk. Hermione's back was to her, her head an asymmetrical lump of hair, the illumination from the candles and the barrier dim enough that she could barely tell it was supposed to be brown, the mass of fuzzy locks kind of blurring together in the patchy shadows, tinted slightly by the coloured candlefire...
It was pretty in here, in a quiet, dark, subtle way. And also it smelled nice, the orange and the clove, a faint hint of lavender oil from the bubbles...
Hermione was toward the right side of the bath, which was convenient — Liz had left her things toward the left side, near the steam controls. She hooked in that direction, all the way to the end, she quick made sure all her things were still on the rim of the tub — checking by hand, the shadowy blobs mostly unidentifiable by sight — and she still had everything, right, good. Leaning with one hand on the rim, Liz stepped over, one foot floofing through the bubbles and plunging into the water beneath.
Abruptly, she froze, at the unexpected feeling of Hermione's attention brushing over her, Liz's breath catching in her throat and her skin crawling. It was just reflex, by the feel of it, Hermione looking over at the noise, she glanced away again immediately. Forcing out a thin, shaky sigh, Liz stepped the rest of the way over, and sank down into the water.
The bubble stuff didn't just made the bubbles, also made the water vaguely oily and soft, rather pleasant, honestly. Especially since Hermione had made it especially hot, almost as though it were searing its way into her — not in a painful way, just, the heat wrapping around her and pushing in, nice — but the texture still smooth and soothing at the same time. And, as deep as the water was, the additional layer of bubbles covered her up to the clavicles, because she was stupid short and magical bathtubs tended to be a bit deeper than muggle ones, which was convenient, for silly Liz is broken reasons.
"Water too hot?"
Liz shook her head...then realised after a second that, even if Hermione were looking at her (and she wasn't at the moment), it was dark enough that she probably wouldn't be able to see that very well. "No, it's good. Um. Great, even, like I said, I'm too bloody cold all the time, this is nice."
"Good." The water sloshed against Liz a little bit — Hermione was moving, turning to sit more toward the end of the tub, opposite Liz. Her attention directed this way, Liz tensed a little, but it was pretty unfocussed, Hermione couldn't actually see her very well. Just a vague pressure and not the direct focus of someone's eyes, Hermione generally aware Liz was here but not really looking at her, if that made sense. "You doing all right over there?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. Tense, but. I might babble a little, by the way, I do that sometimes when I'm nervous. Distracting myself, I think..."
"I've noticed. Sometimes you get quiet, though, and I'm not sure if there's a difference."
Liz hesitated for a second. It was only Hermione. "Quiet is fear. Babbly is just nerves."
"...Ah. That makes sense." Hermione was silent for a moment, Liz could feel her casting about for a change of subject. "This is rather nice, by the way, with the candles and all." A flicker of amusement, and something else Liz couldn't read. She could only vaguely make out Hermione's face, a shadowy blob that was recognisable but missing most of the details, so she actually wasn't certain if she could tell she was smiling because she saw it or if mind magic was making up the difference. "When you do have a girlfriend again, I'd suggest arranging something like this — just a few little extra touches, and this could be very romantic."
Feeling warmth crawling up her face that had nothing to do with the heat of the water, Liz bit out a scoff. "Shut up."
Honestly, embarrassing as it was for Hermione to point it out — while they were both sitting here completely naked, come on, Hermione — it wasn't a bad idea. Add some flower petals, maybe some little bite-sized things to snack on while they lingered in here, some music, maybe? (Liz wasn't really that into music, but she knew other people were.) She'd have to protect the turntable from the steam somehow, in a way that wouldn't mess with the sound, but she was sure someone had come up with a solution for that sort of thing. Whatever, she'd keep it in mind.
Oh right, Katie had suggested they could soak in the jacuzzi thing in a totally innocent friends kind of way, during one of the duelling team trips, she'd probably think that's a great idea. Liz just had to get to the point that that was a feasible thing for her to do. And, you know, actually ask her out and everything, but she was still very sure that was going to happen eventually. Being a Seer could be like that.
...Actually, she should maybe consider getting a muggle bathing suit somewhere, so they could do that this summer. Wherever they were staying next time was likely to have something like that too — lots of places catering to professional duellists or other athletes tended to, thought they were good for sore-muscle-relaxing reasons — and this summer would be the last time they were on a team together. Liz didn't know whether or not they'd be a thing by then (her Seer feelings weren't that precise), but she should still have a bathing suit for it either way. Getting one would be uncomfortable, at least in part because she'd literally never worn one before and wouldn't know what she was doing, and trying on clothes at public stores was already super awkward to begin with, but, she could do that, she guessed. Not a bad idea, at least, might even just be nice for sore-muscle-relaxing reasons, Katie aside...
Thankfully, thinking about that was a good distraction from what was actually going on — though how dark it was helped, honestly. It wasn't like she forgot Hermione was there, she could feel her mind, and the vague, generalised sense of her attention. But, without the intense focus of feeling her eyes at any particular point, the feeling of being watched wasn't actually that bad. Liz was still uncomfortable, she felt a little twitchy, but it was tolerable. Enough that she managed to force herself to loosen up a little, dip under the water to wet her hair. (She carefully pulled her legs in as she did, aware that Hermione was not that far away, avoid nudging her.) Might as well get started on the actual washing up part as long as she was here, she had some shampoo stuff that should supposedly help with her hair being impossible, though she hadn't really notice that much of a difference...
When she surfaced again, her hair gone all heavy and bubbles clinging to her cheeks, Hermione started talking, surprising her a little. "So, what was that in the news about Grindelwald, anyway?"
Liz blinked, frowning to herself — what? Peeking in Hermione's head a little, she could see she was legitimately interested, but she also thought it was a good idea to keep a conversation going. You know, help take Liz's mind off of what they were doing, give her something else to focus on. Which, again, thoughtful of her, if maybe not quite strictly necessary. (There were reasons that, when Tamsyn had suggested finding a friend who would be good for this exposure stuff, she'd instantly thought of Hermione.) Just not sure what she meant. "What about him?"
"Did you see that the Bohemian delegation petitioned the Senate to have Grindelwald released? Those are the Czechs, right?"
"Think so." The magical countries being different than on the muggle side was confusing sometimes — also, hadn't muggle Czechoslovakia broken up just recently? Liz didn't pay that much attention. Whatever, not important. "That happens like once a year, I think, one of the neocommunalist countries will ask to let him out. Well, two, technically? Germany demands the I.C.W. hand over control of the prison he's in every year — it's inside German borders, but the I.C.W. manages it, they assume the Germans will let him out if they hand it over — but one of the communalist countries will take turns making an official motion to release him every year. It's a whole thing."
"Ah, I see, I never heard of that before. Though, I suppose we don't get much international politics in the papers here."
"Yeah." Liz dribbled a dollop of the shampoo stuff into her hand, started working it into her hair. It kind of made her scalp tingle, but it did have magic in it, she assumed it was supposed to do that. "As soon as the interim I.C.W. governments opened the occupied countries back up to local rule, that's been going on every year. They don't have the votes to let him out yet, but honestly it's pretty close. Especially after Poland switched sides just a couple years ago — only, what, two or three more votes in the Senate, and they have it? They probably have it already, there are a few countries that abstain every time, if they decide not to one year..." If the Gaels do break off, there'd probably be international consequences too, since they were more likely to side with the communalist faction...which was another reason for Britain to try to stop them, it was a whole complicated thing.
Hermione was silent for a moment, her mind ticking away. Well, not completely silent, from the sounds Liz was pretty sure Hermione was doing something with her hair over there too. "Really. Do you think that's...likely to happen?"
"Clara says it's inevitable, the way politics on the Continent are going — the neocommunalists are getting stronger every year. But when they do have the votes, they might hesitate, since the conservative countries will almost certainly invade Germany to try to stop them letting Grindelwald out. But yeah, eventually." Especially since Grindelwald didn't seem to be ageing? Some weird ritual he must have done at some point, Liz assumed, but from what she'd read nobody really knew what it was. Since it didn't seem like Grindelwald would die in prison (as the conservatives had probably been hoping), it was only a matter of time.
"Can they do that? just let him out? I mean, he has been sentenced for all manner of crimes, I imagine it's more complicated than simply deciding to let him go."
Liz's response was delayed a little, using wandless magic to get her shampoo-thickened hair to coil up on the top of her head, and stay there. This stuff had to soak for a while to work, best way to stop it from accidentally getting in the water and rinsing out. "No, he hasn't."
"What do you mean? There was a trial at the end of the war and everything."
"Did you read the transcripts and newspaper articles from the time?"
Hermione hesitated for a moment, the constant mechanical clicking of her mind running through with irritated sparks. She hadn't in fact — she had, perhaps foolishly, assumed that her history textbooks would have described the events accurately. "No, I didn't. I read that there was a trial, and he was sentenced to life in Nurmengard."
"That's not entirely wrong — there was a trial. The problem was they were having trouble coming up with any crimes he'd committed. Well, international crimes, I mean, obviously he broke plenty of laws before the Revolution took power in Saxony." His political organisation was itself illegal, and most political systems didn't legally permit their own overthrow, so. "But he didn't break any international laws — the I.C.W. just exists to enforce Secrecy, and Revolutionary Saxony kept Secrecy. Honestly, they probably shouldn't have, considering the Nazis and all, but they did, so."
If it were Liz, she suspected she would have couped Nazi Germany, and whatever other fascist countries they had access to through their allies, and taken over the government(s) in one quick magically-coordinated operation, and then go on the radio to announce to the muggles who they were and what they'd done, and present the end of Secrecy to the mages as a fait accompli. She got that the leadership had been concerned that intervening would have caused the break-out of an even worse international war, inevitably leading to many many millions of deaths, but frankly Secrecy was doomed anyway — they might as well have ripped off the bandage and gotten it over while they had the chance. And not-so-incidentally cut the Nazis' campaign of mass slaughter off early while they were at it, of course. But it was too bloody late now, so whatever.
(And yes, so far her strongest disagreement with Grindelwald that she'd come across was that he hadn't gone far enough. She did realise how that sounded. She still wasn't super confident about all this politics stuff, hadn't nearly gotten through all of Tamsyn's books yet, but the people thinking she was a neocommunalist, or at least a class-treasonous sympathiser, probably had a point.)
"I can't imagine the I.C.W. doesn't have some way to manage disputes between member states — the war itself must have been illegal somehow."
"Sure, I guess, but Saxony didn't start the war, did they? Muscovy invaded Lithuania, and Lithuania asked for their help — it's perfectly legal to come help an ally at their request. Arguably, that's what all of countries who got in the war after that did, but if anyone was responsible for starting the war in the first place, it was Muscovy." The conservatives blamed the Revolutionaries for existing at all, of course, but it was sort of difficult to argue that in court. "Some of the things they did in the war are illegal now, but they weren't at the time. The I.C.W. passed laws since about expropriating property in occupied territory and all, that one Grindelwald would definitely be guilty of, or at least the Revolutionaries in general if not him personally, and there's things that would have made the public tribunals illegal, but they couldn't exactly prosecute Grindelwald for breaking laws that didn't exist yet."
"That's absurd. So, what, they've been holding him in prison for almost fifty years for no reason at all?" Hermione sounded extremely irritated, a dark hot crackle sparking on the air in her direction. Which, you know, fair enough.
"Well, not no reason, but not a good reason, no. At first, they were hoping the Revolution would fizzle out without their leader — also, they could use him as a hostage to try to get people to surrender." Which worked way more often than it should have, bafflingly. Grindelwald himself had written since that they should have kept fighting, and just let their enemies execute him if it came down to it. (He was, after all, only one man.) But Liz guessed it was too bloody late for that now, too. Worked out well enough, since the neocommunalists managed to weasel their way back into power anyway, the ICW too weak and spread thin to entirely crush them out of existence, but still. "Now they're convinced he's simply too dangerous to let out. They compromised with the communalists to let him have better living conditions — the entire floor of the tower his cell used to be in was remodelled into a little flat, basically — and let him have reading material and stuff, since like the early Seventies they've allowed letters and whatever from and to practically anyone. They open everything coming in and out, you know, making sure he's not coordinating partisans somewhere or anything like that. So it's kind of more like house arrest than actually being in a proper prison? But they believe he'll become an existential threat to the I.C.W. and Secrecy if they let him out, so, they've just kept him this whole time."
Hermione was silent for a moment, by the faint lapping of the water doing something over there. Her mind ticking away, practically fuming, Liz could feel the frustration hot and sharp against her skin from here. After a little bit, she grumbled, "The magical world sometimes, honestly. That can't possibly be legal."
Liz shrugged — when the state did it, they made it legal. That was how laws worked.
The bath itself went more or less smoothly from there, Hermione and Liz mostly talking about the Communalist Revolution, and all the complicated politics still going on as a consequence decades later. (Liz wasn't the most informed about the topic, but Hermione still mostly read British history books, which were basically just propaganda.) With the lights out, so Hermione's attention didn't feel too sharp, and how pretty and quiet and nice-smelling it was in here, and with the conversation to distract herself, it really wasn't that bad — not really any harder than the baths she had by herself, honestly. It'd probably be more stressful if Hermione could actually see her, but this was super manageable.
There were a few bad moments. They did nudge each other now and then — the bath was pretty big for a single person, but it wasn't so big that it could fit two people with no risk at all of them accidentally touching each other. Every time their feet or legs touched, Liz felt herself go all tense, her heart jumping up her throat and her skin crawling, but then the moment passed and she calmed down again. There was a really bad moment when she was giving her skin a pass with her scrubby thing, and she was getting at, um, sensitive places, on her knees so she could get her scrubby thing everywhere it needed to go down there, and she abruptly realised what she was doing, and Hermione was right there...
So, it didn't go perfectly smoothly, but she got through it fine. Honestly, she'd been worrying far too much — now that she was actually doing it, and Hermione was being cool about it, it really didn't feel like that big of a deal anymore. After washing up properly and everything, they ended up lingering a lot longer than Liz had expected, just talking, and... She could feel how very relaxed Hermione was, pulsing off her in soft gentle warm waves, that probably helped...
Until Liz caught a thought from Hermione that it must be getting late by now, she should probably get up to Gryffindor before too much longer. She had a nasty feeling that getting out, getting dried off and dressed, was going to be much worse than just sitting here.
She was kind of dreading it, honestly. But they couldn't just stay in here forever, and fuck, she was going to have to turn the lights on...
After a couple minutes to psych herself up, Liz suggested that, yeah, they should probably get going. Hermione asked about the bubbles and the stuff in the water — pleasant, yes, but would probably leave some kind of residue on their skin if they let it dry — but there was a little shower space in the corner over here, they'd just rinse off quick. Hermione started moving right away, water sloshing against Liz (the surface shifting up and down on her chest kind of tickled), pattering against the tile, but Liz needed an extra few seconds, stiff, taking long slow breaths. Then she levered herself up, the water running off of her, and stepped over onto the floor.
She immediately felt terribly self-conscious — the water dribbling down her body and her hair clinging at her skin and the vague diffuse feeling of Hermione's attention really didn't help. It took a couple tries to pull up the plug with a quick tug of wandless magic, the tub beginning to drain, she started walking toward the corner, her steps stiff and painfully awkward. Her balance seemed off for some inexplicable reason, messing up her pace and feeling all clumsy, which was ridiculous, nothing was any different at all, just...
It was too dark to make out the controls, Liz quick cast a blob of light. And then immediately tensed — she felt Hermione's eyes on her back, firm and uncomfortably tactile, far more focussed than it'd been in the darkness. Thankfully, after only a second or two Hermione realised what he was doing, and glanced away. Letting out a shaky breath, Liz quick switched the shower on, and let her light go out. The water was a little cooler than she might have preferred, but she'd rather deal with that than stand here (completely naked) fiddling with it longer than was completely necessary.
Once they were rinsed off, they started crossing the room, water pattering against the floor as they both wrung out their hair. (It didn't matter if they got water all over the place, the room was enchanted to dry itself out anyway.) Instead of casting another light to find the controls to switch off the steam, she just summoned one of the candles to herself — which still illuminated her body more than she was comfortable with, she felt Hermione's eyes on her again for a blink. The steam off and the barrier down, stepping back into the other half of the room...
Liz would prefer to dry off before turning the lights back on. She knew she was probably going to have to let Hermione see her at some point...unless she got clever with towels...though, actually, it was probably better to not get too clever about it, the whole point of this exercise was exposure (both figuratively and literally). She decided, trying to ignore the cold churning in her stomach, to not try to hide when she did turn the lights back on, and just get dressed normally, and try not to freak out. But anyway, having to touch herself — even indirectly, through a towel — while Hermione was right there, feeling her eyes on her (even if it was only incidentally) felt like too much, so, she'd rather dry off in the dark.
Hermione agreed that that was acceptable, so, Liz carefully visualised what she knew the towel rack looked like, and summoned the one at the top of the stack — it obediently flew over toward her, she handed it to Hermione, and then summoned a second one for herself. Though she didn't actually use this one to start towelling off, instead gathered up her hair, wrapped the whole length up in it, and then coiled it around and up, pinning the whole bundle in place on the top of her head with a wandless charm. She used to cheat and just use carefully-layered drying charms on her hair, but supposedly those didn't mix well with the potion in this shampoo which supposedly helped with impossible hair, so. She could put heating and drying charms on the towel, to help suck the water out faster, it wasn't a big hassle. (As long as she didn't need to be anywhere soon after a bath, anyway.) Then she summoned a third towel to actually dry off the rest of her.
And that was extremely comfortable, of course, Liz feeling painfully self-conscious about every motion, tense and jumpy. She did her best to, just, try not to think about what she was doing. Managed to get through it without completely freaking out, at least...
Right, Liz was done drying off. Was Hermione done drying off? did she need a second towel for her hair? Good, good. Then, she just had to turn the lights back on again. She drifted a bit in the direction of the counter, where she'd left her clothes — though she couldn't tell where on the counter, she wasn't sure how close she actually was to them. She could feel her fingers shivering, her heart throbbing, skin sizzling with nerves. It took a few seconds to work through the knot in her throat enough to actually speak the enchantment key.
She grimaced at the sudden brightness stabbing into her head, squeezed her eyes closed. "Alterētur lucernās, quā dīminuat candōrem." Squinting her eyes open a sliver, she waited a second, and yeah, that was better, fuck...
Hermione spoke, making Liz jump a little. "I'm still jealous that they just give you a list of the enchantment keys at the beginning of the year — they tell us the on and off keys in Gryffindor, but that's it. I ended up asking Weasley back in second year. Percy Weasley, obviously."
Living in the Gryffindor dorms sounded pretty miserable in general, honestly, the enchantment keys were hardly the only problem...
Liz did feel Hermione's eyes on her back, but only for a blink, quickly going for her own clothes. The pile of Liz's stuff was actually a bit to her right, oops. Because Hermione was strangely unselfconscious about this stuff, she hadn't bothered setting out her clothes ahead of time. Liz was still sorting out her clothes, loosening the laces so she could actually get the knickers on, when Hermione plopped her bag down on the counter a couple feet away, and started pulling fresh clothes out — her hair wrapped up in her towel, trailing down her back, but otherwise completely uncovered.
Her attention drawn by the sound, Liz looked that way, and because she was a fucking perv sometimes kind of ended up staring at Hermione in the mirror. Just, hormones, okay, she was blaming hormones — Hermione had nice tits, couldn't help it. She was only startled out of it when Hermione glanced up, meeting Liz's eyes for a second but her attention (which Liz could feel through the mirror) quickly focussing on her scars, lancing in hot and sharp. There was a lurch in Hermione's head, a clingy heavy hot-cold feeling of...Liz wasn't sure what to call that. Hermione was aware the curse scars on Liz's chest existed, of course, had even caught glimpses now and then, but she'd never gotten such a close, uninterrupted look before.
Liz didn't think she'd call that feeling pity, exactly. Sympathy, maybe? Hermione was aware Liz was pretty neurotic about it, and, she had things she disliked about her body too...which was still baffling, Hermione might have a little bit of pudge on her but, just, look at her, Liz was trying not to and doing a bad job of it, honestly...
(She was getting the feeling that her parents being unreasonably fit and all the stupidly skinny women in muggle media had given Hermione some kind of complex, because her own mental image of what she looked like simply didn't match with reality.)
Feeling Hermione looking directly at her chest was extremely uncomfortable, but Liz grit her teeth, glaring into the mirror, and forced herself not to cringe away. It wasn't a freakish thing, and even if Hermione thought it was, it didn't really matter, she wasn't going to get in trouble (locked in the cupboard or put on the sofa), she knew why she reacted the way she did to things but it was fucking stupid, she was fine, it was just Hermione, nothing was going to happen, she was fine...
It only lasted for a couple seconds, though, Hermione's eyes pulling away once she realised what she was doing, Liz shivering a little as the worst of the tension loosened. See, she was fine, nothing was happening, no big deal.
And if she was going to do this properly...
Before she could talk herself out of it, Liz backed away from the counter a little. She had to anyway, to get her knickers on without banging against anything — but she turned partway to Hermione as she did. A spark of curiosity in her head, Hermione glanced her direction, Liz stiffened as she felt eyes press against her skin, almost like a physical touch. But she just tried to act normal, turning her knickers the right way around.
She felt Hermione's eyes trail down, brushing over her stomach—
—and zero in between her legs, a feeling Liz wasn't paying enough attention to to read flickering in her head, she did her best to ignore it, bent to pull on her knickers, the motion stiff and clumsy and awkward—
—lifting a foot off the floor to step into them, her breath practically freezing in her lungs, because she could feel Hermione's eyes (like a physical touch pressing in) on her privates, which was extremely uncomfortable, but she forced herself to keep moving, unsteady enough she almost lost her balance, lifting the other foot to—
At around that point, Hermione realised what she was doing and glanced away, a flickering of tangled feelings in her head. This wasn't nearly as big of a deal for Hermione as it was for Liz, she'd been to, like, nude beaches and stuff, changed clothes with her cousins on holiday. It didn't really occur to her, automatically, that she should avoid looking, and catching Liz turning toward her in her peripheral vision, she'd interpreted it as moving to say something, Hermione looking on reflex. Glancing down had maybe been partially curiosity (this was Hermione), but then she'd noticed Liz didn't have pubic hair at all, which was odd. She was definitely old enough to, she must have done something...
She hadn't meant anything untoward by looking, was the point, just reflex and then surprise. Liz suspected Hermione was intentionally keeping her mind so open so she could see that.
(Hermione probably didn't realise that the feeling of eyes on her carried the feeling behind someone's attention too — if she'd been thinking pervy or judgemental thoughts looking at her, Liz would know.)
Once Liz had her knickers pulled all the way up, she tugged at the laces, but didn't pause to properly knot them just now. Instead she lurched a step back toward the counter, picked up her vest and yanked it down over her head — pulling at the bundle of her towel-wrapped hair, but her charms held it together fine. Then she properly tied the waist of her knickers closed, fumbling a little with the ribbon, her breath harsh and thin in her throat and her skin tingling and her heart thudding loud in her ears. She felt tense and hard and jumpy, her fingers shaking making it rather hard to handle the ends of the ribbon — also, her face was on fire, the heat spreading down her neck and chest, the blush intense enough it almost hurt — but she was fine. And now that the moment had passed, that she was covered up again (at least partially), the tension was already starting to trickle away, Liz finally calming down.
So, she'd managed a few seconds of another person looking directly at her without completely freaking out. She was going to call that progress.
Once she had her knickers tied, she leaned against the counter, still feeling a little twitchy, taking a couple slow breaths. Hermione noticed, asked, "Are you all right over there?"
"Yeah, I'm fine." Her voice sounded a little thin and breathless to her own ears. "Um. It's just, you know, kind of a lot. Not having a P.T.S.D. freak-out moment, if that's what you're worried about. It's okay."
That was, in fact, what Hermione had been worried about. There was a moment's pause, Hermione's mind ticking away, some vaguely unpleasant feeling swirling between the gears. Once Liz felt she was steady enough, she reached for her dress again, instead of putting on a fresh pair of shorts — skipping the shorts when she didn't need them was also on the list of things she was trying to do to progressively force herself to be less painfully neurotic about her own body. Normally, she would never wear a skirt without also having the shorts (or some kind of other additional layer) under it, but that was silly, it wasn't like anything was going to happen. Even if someone did accidentally see her knickers, it wasn't the end of the bloody world...
(Honestly, she kind of liked the feeling of wearing a dress without the shorts, more fluttery and... She didn't know, it felt nice in the same way that wearing super girly shite felt nice sometimes. But it also made her extra self-conscious when there were people around, not always worth it, depended on her mood that day.)
"Would it be too much to ask?"
It took her a brief, confused second to put together what Hermione meant — she was still wondering about the lack of pubic hair. "Potion. I wasn't... It was itchy, I got rid of it."
"Ah." Hermione wasn't entirely sure what she meant by itchy — what, did Hermione not notice at all? it'd bothered Liz so much... — but she just accepted that and moved on.
Eventually, they were both dressed, back to normal...or mostly back to normal, anyway. Hermione hadn't brought a proper change of clothes, just pulling on sleep shorts and vest — she'd be going pretty much straight to bed, she'd wear her school robe over them back up to Gryffindor — and Liz's face still felt rather warm, but. They went back to collect their bath things, hitting everything with drying charm before packing them away, Liz putting out the candles and cancelling the charms on them and summoning them to herself with quick little wandless charms. Hermione was jealous that her wandless magic was so smooth, just practise...
(Just walking in these knickers was slightly uncomfortable. They didn't cling so snugly around her, looser and inelastic, so she could feel the cloth shift against her skin as she moved, making her far more aware of the bloody thing than she liked. Most of the time, she preferred not to think about certain parts of her body at all if she could help it...but she was trying to work on that, so.)
Once they were ready, Liz cast an attention-diverting charm on Hermione, and they stepped out of the bath. Liz dumped her towels and her old clothes in the laundry here — yeah, Hermione could put her dirty things here too, the elves would get them back to her. (No idea how they could tell what belonged to who, but they never made mistakes.) She stopped by her room quick to drop off her school robe and her shower bag, before leading Hermione back out through the tunnels. They went up the same passage they came down through — at the parts of the staircase that came out of the wall, Liz could tell it was dark now, the Grand Staircase empty — paused at the exit for Liz to cover herself with another attention-diverting charm. There was a disoriented lurch in Hermione's head, the charm was affecting her — Liz grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the passage, led her up toward Gryffindor.
Hermione could definitely find her own way to Gryffindor from here, but... Well, Liz didn't know, she just... There were probably prefects and stuff about, and they had missed curfew — if they ran into someone Liz could just mind magic them away. Wouldn't want Hermione to get in trouble just because she'd been helping Liz with her shite, especially since she took following the rules far more seriously than Liz did. Not, like, Hufflepuff seriously, but.
They lingered silently at the end of the corridor for a moment, standing there in the murky post-curfew dark, their fingers loosely hooked together. (Had to, Hermione couldn't see through Liz's avoidance charms.) Liz was... She didn't know, she thought she should say something — this had kind of been a big deal, and she was grateful Hermione had agreed to help despite how odd of a request it was — but she didn't know what...
"So...Tuesdays and Thursdays?"
Liz blinked, turned to look up at Hermione. "What?"
"I figure we can find time to do it once on the weekends, but depending on what you have on one day or the other might be better week to week, right? Tuesday's a good day — if we don't have a nighttime Astronomy session we're free that evening, and if we do we can have our bath beforehand. Thursday or Friday we can go straight down after Divination or Cambrian, but Thursday is better for reasons of spacing it out, you know. So, thoughts?"
Well, several, but not really about the schedule. "I... You want to do this as, like, a regular thing?"
"Sure?" Hermione said, drawing the word out a little, her mind subtly flicking with confusion. "I mean, I assumed the point was to keep it up until you're comfortable. I figured we'd keep doing it until...well, until you're done. And I assume you have further steps planned out, right? My understanding is that's how exposure therapy works — the degree of exposure to the stimulus is gradually increased as the patient's panic response adapts."
...
Liz had absolutely no idea what the hell she was supposed to do with this. She meant, Hermione wasn't wrong, and it was kind of convenient she was bringing it up herself, so Liz didn't have to work up the nerve to do it. She just... She hadn't expected Hermione to be this cool about it, that's all.
She cleared her throat, trying to find her voice again. "Um, yeah. Next on the list is...you know, just sitting around. I figured, like, doing homework, or practising scrying or something." Liz found scrying relaxing, anyway. Checking shite out in her pensieve, maybe? Liz knew from experience that, if she was naked when she went into the pensieve, her image there was automatically naked too, so, that would still count. Of course, she knew that from, um, playing around with the sexy memories Tamsyn sent her, which she obviously wouldn't be doing with Hermione, but, other stuff. "And after that is sleeping. You know, literally."
"Ah..." There was a funny little twitter in Hermione's head at something, but she started talking again before Liz had time to figure out what it was. "The former shouldn't be too much of a problem. A little odd, but... You know how to make it warmer in your room, right?" Liz nodded — she practically had to if she was going to be spending pretty much any time at all without clothes on. "Right then, shouldn't be a problem. Sleeping is going to be awkward for me too, though, I don't know if I've ever slept in the nude before. But it's not a big deal, I mean, I can keep helping. So, Tuesdays and Thursdays?"
"...Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays are good. I, um, I'll tell you when the weekend is coming up which day is going to look better for me."
"All right, it's a plan. I'll bring a book next time, you'll have to show me that spell."
"Okay." If they were going to be reading in there, they'd probably linger even longer — not that that was a problem, she guessed, Liz could obviously get Hermione back up to Gryffindor undetected just fine. "Um. Thanks."
"Sure."
"No, I mean, really. I... I know this is really bloody weird, and I don't... Well, I didn't think you'd be nearly so nice about this, I fully expected it to be, you know. Not that I thought you wouldn't agree to help, just that it'd be more awkward, and..." That Hermione was practically jumping to keep helping, coming up with a schedule and all was, just, completely unexpected. Liz was still a bit bewildered, honestly, hard to believe it was really happening. "Just, thanks, that's all."
"Well, of course I was—" Hermione cut herself off, glanced away for a second, parsing what she wanted to say. "I know this is hard for you, Liz, obviously, but it's really not for me. Honestly. I'm certain it's going to be a bit awkward at points, but, that's manageable. A little bit of discomfort on my end is a negligible price to pay to help you work through something like..." There were a few little flashes in her head, Hermione unsure how to refer to doing what she could to help Liz heal from her shite childhood. But she couldn't think of how to get the meaning she meant across without being terribly blunt, so instead she just skipped over it. "If I can help you, especially with something that's truly very minor from my perspective, of course I'm going to. I was never not going to help, however I could. You know?"
"...Yeah." She didn't know what to say other than that. It was, just...a lot.
(It seemed Liz still wasn't entirely used to the idea that people actually cared about her now, sometimes it snuck up on her.)
They stood there for a moment, neither of them speaking — in fact, Liz was having feelings, churning in her chest and tightening her throat. She couldn't say what feelings those were, exactly, but she was pretty sure it'd be audible on her voice, and she didn't want Hermione to notice and make a whole thing about it. She probably should just leave, but, she didn't know, didn't quite feel like the right moment. Liz saw something resolving in Hermione's mind, she was about to say—
"Would a hug be too much, under the circumstances?"
(That wasn't what Liz had thought Hermione was about to say, actually.)
...Fine. By under the circumstances, she meant so soon after Liz had been desperately trying not to lose her mind like a crazy person, but she was mostly back to normal now. Well, oddly emotional, even if she couldn't say exactly emotional how, because she was just so fucking bad at feelings. But not freaking out, at least. And if Hermione wanted to, for whatever squishy normal person reason, that was fine. Letting out a little sigh of exasperation — put on, mostly, she didn't really mind — she stepped around in front of Hermione, keeping their fingers in contact so Hermione could see under the diversion charm. Hermione let her bag slump down to the floor, which probably wasn't the best idea, since it'd be detectable to anyone coming by...
And hugging, because they were doing this now.
Both of Hermione's arms had ended up over Liz's (because short), Liz's arms around her waist and face kind of smooshed against her chest (because short). The bundle of her hair still wrapped up in a towel on top of her head was getting nudged a little, but it wasn't a big deal, her charms were holding. Hermione was all soft and warm, arms kind of squeezing Liz against her tighter than expected, she didn't know what—
Ooohh, right. The close contact making Hermione's familiar busy clockwork mind very very loud, Liz could see Hermione had gotten into a loop thinking about Vernon, and how fucked Liz's life was sometimes. Partially because they'd gotten pretty close to directly talking about it a couple times tonight, and also with how obviously nervous Liz had been...and also she'd noticed the faint lines on her bum at some point, Liz hadn't even felt that happening at the time...
She was feeling especially squishy and protective at the moment, was the thing. So, hug.
The hard edge of protectiveness was very odd, honestly — especially since there wasn't any situation imaginable where Liz wouldn't be able to protect herself and Hermione would — but Liz guessed there had to be some reason she was in Gryffindor.
She'd already had a kind of emotionally exhausting evening, what with the bath and everything, and the hug wasn't helping, soft and comfortable and Hermione's mind all warm and energetic around her, arms holding tight, that uncharacteristic urge to shield her somehow, as though she could go back in time and make it not have happened, and I was never not going to help, however I could, and part of Liz was back in Severus's house a year ago, casting that patronus...
Do you have any friends you trust, absolutely? Someone who you know would never harm you, even should they have the opportunity to, who is always on your side.
The Patronus Charm is not motivated by a feeling of happiness, but of safety.
Yeah, it was just a little bit much, all put together — it was only a few seconds before Liz felt the hot clenching tension tightening her chest, the telltale prickle in her eyes. Grinding out a frustrated groan, she pulled away from Hermione (her arms twitching tighter for a heartbeat before letting go), lurched a couple steps away. She could feel Hermione suddenly couldn't see her, she quick broke the attention-diverting charm before covering her face with both hands, trying to force steady breaths through her aching throat. Fuck fuck fuck, stupid bloody thing...
"Liz? Are you okay?"
"Yeah, just—" Her voice came out thick and croaky, because of course it did. Liz lifted one hand to vaguely wiggle in the air. "Feelings, bleh."
There was a pulse of warm, squishy, affectionate amusement from Hermione, which wasn't making the almost-not-quite-crying better. "Yes, well, I love you too, Liz."
...Also not helping. Liz just let out a groan, which probably wasn't the best response to...that, but it was all she had at the moment. "Can we, just, be done, before I em-embarrass myself any worse, please."
"You're not embarrassing yourself, but I should get inside anyway." Still covering her face, she heard Hermione pick up her bag. "Good night, Liz. See you tomorrow."
"Mhmm."
Hermione's footsteps padded down the hall, her mind gradually slipping away. After a minute, she'd given the password — she glanced back at Liz, her eyes raking over her, hesitating just a second (not sure if leaving her out here was the best idea, but also didn't want to push) — and then the portrait was closed, the wards around Gryffindor cutting off the presence of her mind. And Liz was left alone standing in the corridor, trying not to cry.
If she could stop inexplicably crying when feelings happened, that'd really be great, thanks. It happened less often since she and Daphne broke up, but it was obviously still a problem — she just wasn't exposed to circumstances that caused it as much. Severus had suggested it still happened to him, and he was all old, so it was probably never going to stop, it was so fucking frustrating...
She managed to stop herself from breaking down entirely, quick covered herself with another diversion charm before starting back toward Slytherin. It didn't matter if she still looked all sniffly and gross and obviously emotional if nobody could see her, after all.
Oh god, hopefully she didn't cry next time, this could quickly get so exhausting...also, future girlfriends would probably take it the wrong way if she couldn't take off her clothes without dissolving into a humiliating weepy puddle...