4th May 1996 (64:01:35)
— Contact plus 00.08.01:21.30
Hermione had always wondered what it would be like for the Statute of Secrecy to fail, how the muggle and magical worlds would meld — or if they would it all, if the mages would simply remain hidden in their enclaves, regardless of knowledge of their existence being popularised. What they'd ended up getting was not quite how she'd imagined it...though she supposed the fact that it'd come at the same time as a bombing campaign that'd wreaked massive destruction across the Continent and mobilisation to oppose an invasion by literal space aliens probably had something to do with that.
It hadn't even been a year, but Britain was already different, in some very visible ways. Hermione didn't normally see it happening, busy with her work over in Groningen, so in a way it was only more noticeable on the occasions she returned home, confronted all at once with what had been slow developments. While a significant percentage of the population had been sent overseas to fight the aliens directly, or were absorbed into various defensive groups kept in reserve in the event of another attack here at home, that still left countless people who'd been displaced by the initial bombing or who found themselves unemployed due to the economy essentially grinding to a halt overnight. So there were a surprisingly large number of people on hand to help manufacture all manner of products, or to be put to work on the innumerable reconstruction projects the UK had suddenly found itself in need of — of course, the bombing had done severe damage to transportation and communications networks, not to mention basic utilities for a large portion of the country, there had been a staggering volume of work to do.
The people planning reconstruction, suddenly, found they had access to magical techniques and magical experts from the Ministry's Department of Public Works. Magical infrastructure did have advantages in certain areas, so they might as well use whatever they had available. One big one that Hermione had heard about was plumbing. Mages didn't have public water systems, instead each building had its own water reserves, operating as a closed system: water was transported up from a large central tank up to wherever it was being used, the drain teleporting it down to somewhere it was magically filtered and purified, returning to the tank to be used again. (It was common for there to be two closed systems, one for drinking and bathing and a second for waste, so if there was a failure of the cleaning enchantments the first sign wasn't accidentally drinking unsanitary water, but the principle was unchanged.) While the system did lose water with time, through evaporation or wastewater simply not ending up returning to the system for whatever reason, it was typical for mages to just pour a gallon of water down the drain every week or two and not think about it otherwise — some were even set up to collect rainwater, purified and directed into the system automatically, requiring practically no maintenance at all.
That was, obviously, far more efficient than familiar muggle plumbing and water purification. The placement of such a system did take a fair amount of work — for best effect, the enchantments needed to be slightly tweaked in situ to suit the ambient environment — but it didn't require laying pipes through the ground all over the place, or centralised water and sanitation services. The former was more or less of an issue regionally, as the areas affected by the bombing had often sustained severe damage to pipe networks, and the latter was becoming increasingly important as time went on, since such centralised utility stations required significant volumes of electricity to function correctly.
The Commission had developed a method to magically produce electricity more or less reliably, but there were limitations. The dynamo could only be scaled up so much without causing serious stress on the ambient environment of the area — especially since it needed to be shielded in order to prevent the dynamo itself from scrambling its own output, and those wards needed a particular environment in order to function, the demands of the two sets of enchantments must be carefully balanced. After some experimentation, they determined it would work best with a distributed network, more numerous stations providing power to much smaller areas. A station the size of a house could power the area for several blocks around it, but build any larger than that and they started encountering serious problems with the interaction of the enchantments, for the time being that was the best they could do.
Of course, that was good enough to have a sizeable dynamo dedicated to a single, power-intensive location — like a hospital, for example, or military or research sites. They'd been stretching their fuel reserves by increasingly switching over essential services first, the rest rationed out for civilian use, but the ultimate goal was to simply run everything on magically-generated electricity. After all, it was essentially infinite free power, now that it was available there was really no reason to keep relying on fossil fuels or nuclear power or whatever else...so long as they continued to need electricity at all, of course, there were people at the Commission working on that...
But regardless, dedicated magical dynamos could power water and sanitation infrastructure without any difficulty, but that didn't solve the problem of the plumbing networks themselves. Most of the country, geographically-speaking, still used traditional plumbing, but most new structures built after the bombings, or which had been cut off from the local water resource for whatever reason, instead used an adaptation of the magical method. Each time she'd visited Oxford, more and more remodelling work had been done, including new water systems — though she hadn't noticed until she'd asked Dad why the tap water at his clinic suddenly tasted different, and he'd told her all about it.
Another sector that had seen large-scale adaptation of magical methods in a shockingly short time was transportation. Naturally, hubs of rail and road networks were situated in major cities, and had been severely damaged in the bombing campaign. The reliance of traditional vehicles on fuel, either directly through internal combustion or indirectly through electricity generation, was also less than ideal — months later, the streets of most towns were still relatively empty of civilian vehicles, due in part to the ongoing rationing of fuel. (Though that varied by location, more rural areas still more reliant on personal vehicles.) The mages had three different methods that could be adapted to public transportation, each with their own advantages and limitations.
The mages had already had preexisting infrastructure supporting transportation through the floo and portkeys. The floo operated through a system similar to a cellular network in some ways — point-to-point travel was possible anywhere within the same cell, but to travel outside of the cell the traveller was redirected through their local hub, then bounced between however many hubs to the correct cell, and from there shunted to their destination. The network required little wider infrastructure within a cell — so long as the starting point and the ending point had functional enchanted grates tuned with a valid password, it should work with no external support whatsoever — but the system that routed travellers from one public hub to the next, automatically, did require some kind of centralised routing mechanism. The system had been knocked out temporarily during the bombing, causing a country-wide blackout of a couple days, before the Department of Transportation managed to get the routing working again — though some of the public hubs in affected areas had been knocked out, and they'd simply restored the old routing system as it was, meaning it occasionally attempted to direct people through hubs that didn't exist anymore, creating unpredictable failures when trying to get places. The network had slowly been adjusted since, and it did actually work now, full coverage of the country restored over the months since the bombing.
When compared to the floo, portkeys had a mix of positives and negatives. Portkeys had a longer range, and could travel over water or tectonic activity more or less uninterrupted — travellers were advised to break up long floo trips into legs of a couple hundred kilometres at most, and to stop before every major body of water or mountain range — and didn't require any additional resource like floo powder, and could operate without a network of any kind. (The landing was smoother if there were focussing wards at the destination, but they weren't strictly necessary.) Portkeys could also transport larger numbers of people at once, though there were increasing safety risks the larger the portkey — keyports used large nets to transport dozens of people simultaneously, but they included safety features like straps and isolation spells in each link of the net, and absolutely should never be used without the focussing wards outside of emergencies. The greatest limitation in portkey use was that they required very delicate spellwork to set. Once a floo grate was properly enchanted, it would function so long as the script remained undamaged and the network was kept up, but a portkey must be recast every time it was to be used, which could generally only be done by a qualified expert in charms and geomancy. It was not simple magic, the vast majority of mages couldn't do it safely. The balance of advantages and disadvantages had inclined mages to prefer floo for free personal domestic travel, and regularly-scheduled portkeys for international travel, a system which worked more or less well when properly maintained.
The third method was something called a gate. Gates, in fact, predated the popularisation of floo travel by a millennium, and the invention of portkeys by at least two millennia, but had been superseded in common use over the centuries for a variety of reasons. Floo travel had once had a very short possible range, which had extended as they'd learned to make transmission more efficient; there was a time that gates were used to ferry people from cell to cell, travelling by floo within each cell, but in time the routing network had been designed and the gates connecting the cells had been phased out. Gates had once been the preferred means of international travel as well, but had become less popular as national floo networks developed, greatly increasing the number of available destinations more quickly than gates could keep up with, and had been entirely eliminated with the implementation of the far more versatile portkey.
Gates functioned by a form of old, primal sympathetic magic, connecting one thing to another by association in order to perform magic on both. These days, the sort of sympathetic magic the average mage was most familiar with was probably a certain sort of blood magic — part of why mages could be so superstitious about blood was because one could use a single drop of blood to severely curse someone from hundreds of kilometres away — but it wasn't seen often these days, an old sort of witchcraft which had fallen out of use as more convenient magics had been developed. If one constructed two identical archways, at more or less out the same time, out of the same materials, in the exact same design, they could be enchanted in order to, effectively, be the same archway, the space within them the same space — one could walk through one and walk out the other, as easily as walking through a doorway.
As convenient as that made it sound, actually implementing gates on a large scale was fiendishly complex. The enchantment to bind the gates together wasn't that bad — it wasn't any more advanced than the enchanting that went into communication mirrors — but the inputs and outputs had to be very carefully filtered and stabilised, to ensure a perfectly continuous plane of effect. If there were any discontinuities in the spell, a person could be effectively shredded into ribbons stepping through it, even a slight imbalance in the wards could end in catastrophic accidents. Also, while gates didn't require a routing network like the floo, they could only exist in pairs: one gate was connected to exactly one other gate. The very basics of how the magic worked required it, it was impossible to generalise the concept in order to...
Well, actually, it might be possible to swap out distinguishing characteristics to switch the destination between available gates, but Hermione would want to do a lot of testing with possible configurations of the stabilising enchantments and isolation wards before playing with that. And she was already busy enough with the computer project, she simply didn't have the attention for it.
Since one gate could only be paired with a single other gate, they simply weren't useful for personal transportation — in part because, even if there were room in one's house for all those gates, that would simultaneously be giving who knew how many people direct access to one's home, which was hardly a desirable state of affairs. Gates could be used for public transportation, however, connecting one transportation hub to another. That had been their most popular use, once upon a time, gates in the centre of town squares facilitating travel to the square one town over, public floo hubs had once had several gates to other hubs. Analogous to inter-city rail, Hermione supposed, floo travel filling the role of urban rail, before the development of the routing network obviated the need for gates entirely.
Mages might be used to the convenience of the Floo Network, but muggles were more accustomed to the need to switch trains at one rail station or another along the way — relying on gates seemed no great inconvenience to them. In fact, it was an improvement on rail in many ways. While gates did take up space, it was nowhere near as much as a full train platform. One could conceivably fit a dozen gates, leading to a dozen distinct destinations, in the space that had once hosted a single stop of a single rail line. While a gate could only fit one or perhaps two people at a time, travel was instantaneous: people could simply queue up and walk through one by one, as easy as walking through a door. The longer a gate was operating, the more likely it was to accumulate interference which could cause terrible accidents, but running it continuously for ten, fifteen minutes was perfectly safe, and it only took a couple minutes to safely reset it again. Gates did have a rather significant effect on the ambient magic around them, but it was one that could be managed with care — there was no reason one couldn't fit dozens and dozens of the things within what had been a perfectly ordinary muggle rail station a year ago.
And that was exactly what they'd done. The morning of Beth's return to Britain, the six of them — Ron, Gin, Luna Lovegood, Mrs Weasley, Sirius, and herself — took the floo from Rock-on-Clyde to the public hub at Oxford. From there, they'd walked a half kilometre or so across town, the place very busy. The government was still headquartered in Oxford (they were even talking about putting up a new Parliament building here and making the move permanent), along with a number of military and research centres, workshops producing newly-designed enchanted devices en masse, the town practically come alive with constant activity twenty-four hours a day. The rail station was somewhat crowded, mostly with arrivals — Beth's arrival was scheduled early enough that they'd left during the morning rush, people from out of town coming in to begin the work day — the outgoing gates rather less populated. There was a line at the Swindon gate, but it was only a wait of a few minutes before they were stepping through in single file.
Hermione passed through the cool, vaguely silky curtain of magic, and was teleported roughly forty kilometres in the space of a single step. Certainly the least uncomfortable method of transportation she'd ever encountered — it was truly a pity how limited it was.
Despite the unusual circumstances they found themselves in, with the revelation of magic and all, the RAF airfield at Lyneham had remained the primary transport hub for military personnel and supplies being flown in and out of the UK. Numerous RAF sites had been hit during the initial bombing, but for whatever reason Lyneham had been skipped over — the runways had been undamaged, the first few rounds of soldiers had been flown overseas on massive transport planes out of Lyneham. However, as the months went by, the military had increasingly started adapting magical transportation methods, due in large part to the lesser resource requirements and the elimination of the risk of being intercepted in transit. Hermione had heard about a transport plane loaded with soldiers bound for the front in Africa being shot down over the Sahara, so that was no small concern.
(She was very relieved Beth's plane had gotten down to the Congo safely, in retrospect. They hadn't all been so lucky.)
Hermione was aware they'd set up keyport facilities and gates and the like at Lyneham, but she didn't know the details — the exact layout of the base was classified. It was possible she could actually access plans through the Commission, if they'd been involved in planning it all at any point, but she didn't care enough to look. (She had enough things on her plate already without distracting herself looking up that sort of thing.) But, for whatever reason, as the site developed further into a magical transport hub, the base became more and more closed off. It used to be somewhat ordinary for press to linger at the gates, or even on-site, filming take offs and landings, families and the like used to be able to meet returning personnel at the gates. While there was still some activity at the entrances, that was generally no longer allowed. Instead, after being debriefed and formally released from duty, servicemen filed through a gate to the rail station at Swindon, well-wishers gathered to meet them there.
Finding room to place gates could be something of a trial — especially in stations with platforms still in use, like Swindon, not helped along by gates not functioning correctly in expanded space — but at Swindon they had the 'advantage' of a sizeable structure on site that had lapsed out of use in recent years. The Signal Point building had hosted various offices over the couple decades since its construction, but as the national economy had developed it'd grown gradually less attractive, fully three-quarters of it left empty — which had provided perfectly convenient space to be remodelled into a large gate station. Having multiple floors meant wards could be built into the structure between them to better isolate them from each other and mediate the ambient environment, allowing even more gates to be crammed into the relatively small footprint, truly very convenient. The RAF Lyneham gate was on the fourth floor, they were on the sixth floor — the open, clean space reminding Hermione very much of any proper rail station, remodelled over the last few months, the building didn't used to look like this — they climbed down, the proper waiting room clearly labelled.
This gate room wasn't like the ones Hermione had seen elsewhere, a barrier blocking off the gate itself guarded by a pair of men in...RAF uniforms of some kind, she was pretty sure. (She wasn't an expert.) The gate led straight into the base, after all, which was only open to authorised personnel, so the security cordon of RAF Lyneham technically extended all the way out into the Swindon rail station. Magical transportation could do funny things to the understanding of space, sometimes. There were people lingering in the waiting room, more than was typical for most gates — normally, the waiting rooms were only necessary while traffic was coming through in the other direction or when the gate was cycling through a brief period of inactivity, it was rather common for the waiting rooms to be mostly empty. Presumably they were waiting for other people being released at the same time as Beth. Not anyone Beth would have served with, she'd volunteered to stay behind to help with reconstruction after the rest of the SCFRS had already been sent home, but people were still constantly being moved around, so that there were other people being let out at the same time wasn't unexpected.
They were just finding a spot to settle in and wait — they were about twenty minutes early, looked like — when Hermione twitched at a call of her name, glanced around. She froze when she spotted the source, brightly grinning and waving in their direction, so intensely bemused she could do nothing else but blink dumbly back.
What the hell was Lavender Brown doing here?
She skipped over, "I thought it was you, it's been forever! How have you been? I haven't heard..." and suddenly Lavender Brown was hugging her, so sudden and out of the blue Hermione just stood there stiffly for a second before her arms reluctantly came up and...
Were they friends now? Since when were Hermione and Lavender friends? Had she just...forgotten that they'd kind of always hated each other? This was so weird...
It wasn't just Lavender, Parvati and Padma had come along too — Hermione had heard from Beth they'd been sort of stranded in Britain for a while, their father had been back home since but it'd been decided that the girls would remain here for now. (With the ongoing unrest in India as a consequence of the bombings and the subsequent landing, Britain was considered a safer place to be, especially for relatively defenceless teenage girls.) There was also Fay, meaning they would be having a spontaneous reunion of all the Gryffindor girls in their year (plus Padma), and then Katie Bell and Alicia Spinnet from the quidditch team. Angelina Johnson hadn't been able to get off on such short notice, apparently she'd joined one of the teams working on reconstruction, Hermione hadn't heard about that...
Hermione guessed she should have expected that Beth might have told other people that she was coming home, and their roommates and her quidditch teammates weren't entirely unreasonable people to want to be here. She was aware Lavender and Parvati had been writing Beth, for some unfathomable reason — mentioning it, Beth claimed to actually appreciate the silly inconsequential gossip, a nice, normal distraction from her circumstances. At least the frequently thoughtless girls had had the good sense not to spread the word that the Girl Who Lived was returning to Britain today, that could easily have drawn a crowd if they were unlucky, which Beth would categorically not appreciate.
It, just, she guessed that all made sense, but it was bloody strange how friendly Lavender was being to her, acting like she'd actually missed her with school cancelled, and... It wasn't as though they were friends, it was so weird, Hermione felt terribly like she'd missed something important.
Introductions went around, Padma unexpectedly taking over to introduce Luna to the older Gryffindors, making a point of mentioning she's a Seer — was that true? It would certainly explain a lot, Seers were sometimes known to be a bit...peculiar. The girls were a little silly about the Sirius Black being here, but seemingly just as a joke, Sirius playing into it, why yes, he was so very dangerous and roguish. (Hermione couldn't quite suppress a roll of her eyes at the giggling.) Before she hardly realised what was happening, Mrs Weasley had invited the girls to join them on their brunch picnic they were going to have to welcome Beth home, um, okay then...
(Hermione noticed immediately that Ron had gone quieter than normal, noticeably red in the face, occasionally stammering out a comment only to glance away all embarrassed. It was really quite funny and even vaguely adorable how terrible he was at talking to girls who weren't Beth or Hermione herself — apparently they didn't count.)
(Of course, that they didn't count seemed to suggest that he had no interest in either of them as anything other than friends — put in the same category in his head as, for example, Gin and Luna — which was how Hermione liked it anyway.)
Somewhat surprisingly, Lavender and Parvati wanted to ask her about her work at the Commission — they'd hardly ever had any respect for her interests before, the question so unexpected Hermione was honestly suspicious at first. It turned out Beth had told them about her contribution to the invention of the crystal radio — the formal term they'd settled on was personal PCRT device (that is, Programmable Crystalline Resonance Transmission), but the colloquial term had quickly become crystal radio, in contrast with transistor radios — and it seemed they were actually interested in that. Which, again, odd.
Hermione guessed just being an ordinary frumpy swot was deeply uncool, but now that she was an accomplished artificer it was impressive? Whatever, she could never understand these girls, and she honestly didn't care that much. It was just vaguely irritating, all the grief they'd given her over the years for actually caring about their lessons...
The pair didn't know enough about computers to understand why that invention was so impressive, but neither did hardly any of the other mages Hermione had talked to about it. The average mage did know more about muggle life than they used to, but it was still a work in progress.
After some minutes, there was a shudder through the room, a pulse ringing through the ambient environment vibrating through her — unpleasantly reminding Hermione of bombs hitting London, she tried not to think about that — the blank ceramic tile inside the arc of the gate flashed with blue-white light, then swiftly resolved into an oversaturated glimpse of some hallway somewhere, indistinct human figures shuffling around. Hermione glanced at her watch: they were a little early, but better to be ahead of schedule than behind. There was a brief pause before a reservoir at the centre of the arch started glowing green (confirming the aperture was stable), and a stream of people started coming through single file. Most all in uniform variations, khaki trousers and button-up shirts with a couple different coloured collars (marking different regiments and such, Hermione understood), some with pullover khaki jumpers and others without, insignia and tags and the like visible on shoulders and collars, some wearing caps but others not bothering, presumably packed into the soft-sided canvas bags slung over all their shoulders. As they came through, there was some shouting and waving as one or another was recognised by an onlooker, a little bit of chaos developing as the line broke up, people collapsing into hugs, one couple enthusiastically snogging...
Hermione immediately spotted Beth as she came through the gate — there was hardly likely to be anyone else showing up with a great snowy owl perched on her shoulder. She stood out among the crowd anyway...figuratively, at least, being so short it was actually somewhat difficult to make her out. (Hermione might not have noticed her right away if not for Hedwig.) There weren't exactly a lot of fifteen-year-old girls among the military people streaming out of the gate, and Beth was dressed in different colours, her trousers in black and collar with a band of a steely grey. Her peculiar dark red hair — some kind of magical trait, Hermione suspected, human hair wasn't normally that vibrant of a red colour — had been cut short, a fluttery mess of random kinks and curls forming an asymmetrical halo around her head. It seemed that months in the tropics hadn't made her any less terribly pale, though there was a subtle dotting of freckles on her face and the outsides of her arms, light enough that Hermione hadn't noticed until the line brought her closer — she'd never seen Beth with freckles before, but she guessed the British sun simply hadn't been enough to trigger them.
Seeing Beth standing there, waiting her turn to stream through the simple security checkpoint, Hermione felt something knotted in her stomach loosen up, relief shivering through her, her knees going weak enough she nearly plopped right down onto her chair. (She might have, without Ron's arm right here to grip onto.) Beth was okay. Or still alive, at least. Hermione had known that, of course, she'd been getting quite regular letters the whole time Beth had been gone, interrupted occasionally as she was relocated or busy with a major battle, but it was still...
It was just good to actually see her, that was all.
She could tell when Beth spotted their group, her step hitching for a second, her head tilting. And then Beth was through the checkpoint, weaving through the busy crowd, slipping through to—
Mrs Weasley practically teleported to her once she was clear enough, engulfing her in a strangling hug — Hedwig barely got away in time, lifted off to drift over onto a nearby chair with an irritated krek sort of noise. Beth flailed at first, before her arms just went limp, her hands hanging at her sides. Which was a very obvious sign to Hermione that Beth didn't appreciate being grabbed at, but apparently Mrs Weasley didn't pick up on it. "Um. Hello, Mrs. Weasley..." Her voice sounded slightly muffled.
"We were so worried, Beth, running off to the other side of the world, and..."
"Oh, well. I'm fine, obviously, so..."
After a little bit they managed to extract Beth from Mrs Weasley, the woman backing off to dab at her eyes. (Mrs Weasley had been even more clingy since they lost the twins, understandably, Hermione wasn't at all surprised she was getting a bit emotional.) Of course, Beth was then immediately engulfed in another hug, from Lavender this time — she seemed startled, stiffening in place for a second, but then, a little hesitantly, her arms came up to hug Lavender back. If Hermione had to guess, probably about as baffled about this reception as Hermione was, since it was hardly like Beth and Lavender had ever been particularly friendly either...
Sirius's greeting was somewhat more restrained, a funny sideways hug as he made a comment about all the nice pretty girls who'd shown up to welcome her back — Beth rolled her eyes, a bit of pink rising on her cheeks from all the attention. And then Ginny was stealing a hug, Beth letting out a little surprised oof! from the impact. Parvati and Padma didn't move to touch her, just saying how good it was to see her again all smiling and pleasant — Hermione recalled Parvati did tend to respect Beth's personal space in the dorm, more than the other girls — Luna said something about the sun looking sweet on her, Beth giving her a baffled-looking double-take.
And then Ron and Hermione were there. Ron moved first, taking her in a quick, gruff sort of hug, saying something about being glad she's back, hating being left behind. Beth gave him a crooked sort of smile — Hermione abruptly remembered, in London, Beth telling Ron to go to safety, he'd just get himself killed staying with her — before saying, "Well, I'll be around for a little while, at least. Don't know how long it'll be before they want me for something again, maybe a couple months." Her voice sounded a little lower than Hermione remembered, with a touch of vocal fry that hadn't been there before, something about her accent not quite right. Maybe just out of practice speaking English...
There was some muttering from the others, Ron said, "What, they're sending you out again? Why? I thought the landings were all taken care of."
"They are, but that wasn't all of them. They still have spaceships up there, 'round the moon. I'm gonna need to show up for training and shite, with new people — to be ready, in case they come back. And even when we're not doing that, I was told to be ready to be dragged along with diplomats and V.I.P.s and whoever, who the fuck knows where. Turns out interpreters who can also blow shite up are in high demand, who'd have thought."
...Actually, that made a lot of sense, when Hermione thought about it. Beth was quick enough picking up new languages that she could learn whichever one would be most useful at the destination just in the time it took for everyone else to prepare the trip. And having a translator who could also serve as an intimidatingly-effective bodyguard was just efficient.
It was frustrating, that Beth was going to be taken away from them again, for who could guess how long. But the world was still a mess, there were things that needed being done, things that were more important than Hermione getting to see her best friend regularly. Besides, "Yeah, they're going to have me running around too."
Beth turned to her, one of her eyebrows ticking up. "Really?"
"Of course!" Sirius barked, one hand dropping on Hermione's shoulder. "Our Maïa here's a genius, you know, inventing magical computers and what all, wild shite. They need her to come down and show them how it's done, you see."
Feeling the warmth on her cheeks, Hermione shrugged — Sirius took that as a signal to remove his hand, with a sheepish little oh sorry. She hadn't actually been that bothered by it, she was used to Sirius being rather affectionate by now, but regardless. "Yes, well...something like that, honestly. Some teams have had difficulty getting our techniques to work, simply by reading the documentation and trying to reproduce what we did. It can be somewhat difficult to explain to muggles how to enchant properly, especially for mages, who are accustomed to magical jargon. And the architecture of these devices can be complicated, and need to be tailored to the space and materials at hand, and there are logistical concerns with building in expanded space that need to be—
"Oh, I'm sorry," she cut herself off, "I'm babbling, aren't I?" She hadn't realised until she'd caught the familiar little half-smirk on Beth's face, the same one she wore whenever Hermione let herself get carried away with one thing or another.
"That's all right, it's just familiar. Hermione's babbling at me about some nerdy shite, must be home."
There were some hisses or giggles at that, probably not particularly flattering, but Hermione didn't care, feeling a little lurch, a hot clench on her heart, she— "Oh come here, you." Like always, Beth stiffened in her arms at first, but she immediately relaxed — feeling at once harder and softer than Hermione's remembered, she thought Beth might have lost a little weight since the last time they'd seen each other, but she also seemed more relaxed, as though there'd still been some buried tension there Hermione hadn't noticed, holding herself back. Though, maybe the feeling of hardness was just that Beth's arms were squeezing much tighter than usual, firmly pulling Hermione in, her face turned against her shoulder, hair brushing against Hermione's face.
She smelled unfamiliar, herby green and a faint chemical tang, perhaps from something that'd been on the air at Lyneham. But she was still instinctively familiar, Hermione somehow just feeling this was Beth, that she was still alive, that she was here, after everything that happened, she was okay, even joking around and everything...
"I really missed you, you know," she whispered.
"...Yeah, me too. Love you."
A thick watery laugh forcing its way up, "I love you too, silly."
They let go eventually, Hermione stepping back a little to wipe at her eyes — ugh, annoying, everything was good, honestly. Fay took her turn to say hello, she and Beth doing a complicated handshake sort of thing Hermione couldn't quite follow. They'd become friends when she wasn't paying attention, at the pick-up quidditch games some of their classmates put on now and then for fun. (Fay played beater for one of the local youth clubs, even if the twins hadn't laid claim to the Gryffindor spots she'd rather keep playing for her team anyway.) Alicia and Katie were next, Alicia catching Beth in a hug first — Beth scoffed, made a joke about getting so many hugs today. It sounded like a joke, but Hermione suspected it was at least partially serious, increasingly red in the face and her voice sounding slightly brittle, maybe getting a little overwhelmed
Katie was last, after pulling back from her own hug reaching to give Beth's hair a ruffle. "You chopped it all off, hardly recognise you without that tangled bloody mane all down your back."
"Yeah, well, it was getting in the way," Beth muttered, self-consciously straightening her hair. She must just be feeling awkward at the moment, because she had to know that wouldn't actually accomplish anything.
"Didn't mean it like a bad thing, looks good on you."
Beth froze, blinked up at Katie. "...Thanks? Not meant as a fashion statement, it's just bloody hot in Vietnam. Have to chop the shite off and burn it every morning, grows back overnight, fucking ridiculous..."
Now that everyone had said hello, there was a bit of chatter from there, how Beth was feeling, what they'd planned for the day. Though they weren't sure if there basket was going to have enough for an early picnic lunch for everyone, they might have to pick up some more food somewhere. Beth made a face at early lunch, glanced at her watch (that was new) — she was still on Hanoi time, it was well into the afternoon for her. But that was fine, she could eat. Just had to send Hedwig off first, and then they could—
"Oh wait!" Lavender chirped perking up. "We brought a change of clothes for you. I thought you might not want to spend all day walking around in that plain old uniform, um, here, Padma had it, that bag there..."
Beth frowned at her. "Um, that's thoughtful of you, but I don't think I'm gonna want to wear anything you had lying around."
"Honestly, Beth, we thought of that," Padma said. Holding out the little cloth bookbag to her, "Here, take a look."
Still seeming a bit sceptical, she leaned closer to Padma, pulled the bag open and reached into— "Oh, this is good, actually. Thanks. Let's find the toilets quick, but, first I need to let Hedwig out..."
Beth reached down for Hedwig, the owl — who had apparently been wilderfolk this whole time, Hermione still didn't know what to think about that — hop-climbed her way up to Beth's shoulder, and their group started off for the stairs. The exits were a little crowded, thanks to people coming in through the gates. There was some industry in Swindon these days, Hermione knew offhand that some of the components that went into shielding for electronics and magical electricity generation were made here now, it was possible they were catching some of the morning rush here too. Beth paused at one of the windows in the stairwell, looking over the town, transfigured some of the glass away — they were outside of the wards stabilising the environments around the gates, so that should be fine. She got a couple glances at openly doing magic in public, but at this point nobody cared, not even pausing on their way down the stairs. Beth confirmed Hedwig was fine flying home on her own, the owl (who was apparently also a person?) leaned over to nip the tip of Beth's nose, and then leapt out of the window in a rustle of feathers.
The window patched back up again, they continued downstairs. There were sizeable public toilets down here, clearly marked with signs, they headed that way. Pretty much everyone kept following Beth toward the door, just by reflex — until she stopped a few metres away, pointed out that the bathroom was going to be pretty crowded if they were all coming in with her. Right, er, good point. Parvati took the bag from Lavender — possibly realising that, for all that they were being friendly right now, Beth's relationship with Lavender was complicated, but Parvati was historically better with respecting her space — and Gin actually needed to use the toilet, so the four of them ended up going in together.
Gin zagged straight to one of the stalls, Beth moving toward the sinks, swung her bag down onto the long counter in front of the mirror. They weren't the only other people here, a couple of the stalls were occupied, a middle-aged woman at one of the sinks. Beth opened her bag with a deep draw of a zipper — definitely something the Army must have handed out, they didn't have zippers at all on the magical side, as far as Hermione knew — started taking a few things out to be laid on the counter, a rolled-up Army beret (an almost silvery grey, the badge with the winged torch and stars of the SCFRS showing), some stiff leather pouches.
Hermione felt her eyebrows curl upward at the pistol, hidden in a holster but still identifiable by its shape — she knew Beth would have one of those, but it was peculiar to actually see.
While Beth was doing that, Parvati was emptying her smaller bag, clothes set neatly folded on the counter. Surprisingly, it looked like they'd actually gotten muggle things from somewhere. Hermione honestly didn't know if the pureblood girls had ever even set foot out in the muggle world before Secrecy abruptly ended — she guessed the Patils might have, but certainly not Lavender. There were a pair of perfectly ordinary denims, a cotton tee shirt — oddly, it seemed to feature a Gryffindor-themed design, but cotton tee shirts were very much a muggle thing, Parvati and Lavender must have done that themselves — and a fuzzy flannel button-up overshirt, with a vaguely tartan-looking pattern in red and white and yellow. Potter colours, but Hermione doubted the girls, as crafty as they could be sometimes, had made it from scratch themselves, must have simply seen it somewhere and thought of Beth.
Hermione snorted when Parvati added lingerie to the pile, matched pants and bra, red and lacey and delicate. She seriously doubted Beth would wear that, and surely Parvati and Lavender had to know it, must have just included them to tease her.
It was only a couple seconds later that there was a harsh snort from Beth. She'd already started unbuttoning her shirt...which was kind of a surprise to Hermione, honestly. Was she going to change, just, standing out here? She'd expected Beth to slip into one of the stalls — even just alone with Hermione she could be terribly shy sometimes, badly enough for her to even wonder whether something might have...happened, with her uncle. (Not a serious concern, she didn't really think so, just a possibility that came to mind now and then.) But then, she had been spending months in military camps and the like, Hermione guessed it was possible she'd just gotten used to not having much privacy at some point.
Finishing the last of the buttons, leaving the untucked shirt hanging open — showing subtle hints of scars here and there, probably from that time she'd been shot and set on fire — Beth leaned over to pick up the knickers. Held with one hand at each of the hips, she gave Parvati a flat, exasperated look. "Really?"
"You've been spending so much time in dreary war camps, we thought you might like something nice!" Parvati said it all cheerfully and innocent, smiling bright and sweet, but Hermione didn't believe it for a second.
Obviously Beth didn't either, her lips tilting in a sceptical frown. "Mhmm." She tossed the knickers back at Parvati's bag, fiddled with the bra for a second, checking the band — there was a tag there, the girls must have gotten these things from a muggle supplier somewhere. Beth let out another scoff. She straightened, brushed the lapels of her shirt out of the way, held the lacey bra up against the plain, flesh-toned, wireless one she was already wearing. It was immediately visibly obvious that the one Lavender and Parvati had brought wouldn't fit Beth at all, the cup size far too large. Honestly, Hermione thought the knickers were a little big for her too — she was getting the feeling Lavender had thrown some things she'd gotten for herself in the bag as part of some inscrutable joke. Beth glanced down at herself, then gave Parvati an almost Snape-ish single raised eyebrow.
Parvati kept pleasantly smiling. "I'm sorry, would it be less awkward if we'd guessed your size correctly on the first try?"
Beth rolled her eyes, pitched the bra back toward Parvati's bag. "You two are impossible sometimes, you know that."
"I'm aware you think so, yes."
Beth got her shirt the rest of the way off, tucked it in her bag before picking up the tee shirt, unfolding it and working at getting it the right way around — leaning casually against the counter, seemingly unconcerned being underdressed in semi-public, which was new. (They'd been apart for months, Beth was different now, it was an odd thing to notice.) One of the other women here finished washing her hands, passed by Beth with a polite thank you for your service kind of comment, she just silently nodded back. Gin had come out of the toilet, started washing her hands at the sink next to Beth, she raised her arms to pull the shirt on over her head—
"Hey now, what's that?" Gin blurted out, pointing at a big blotchy scar low over Beth's hip, an inch or two wide and maybe five or six long. And Beth was still tiny, so that was a good fraction of the way over to the opposite hip, a pretty sizeable slash across her waist
"What?" Beth's head appeared back out of the neck of the shirt, but she didn't smooth it down right away, holding the hem up above the nasty-looking scar. "Oh, that. That was one of those bugs, you know, the thrown ones that cut people up? Got itself stuck in there, that was freaky as hell. It looked worse than that at first, but then I got myself set on fire like an idiot, the healing from that smoothed the scar over a lot."
"You were set on fire?!"
"Yeah, that was a stupid mistake. Some of our people were ambushed, I apparated over without thinking, got caught up in friendly fire. Heh, literally. Was shot a few times too, um—" She pulled her shirt up a little further, over her ribs, showing a little round blotch over her ribs on the her left side. "—there, and here—" Pulling the collar down instead, showing another just under her shoulder. "—and there's another..." She loosened her belt, unbuttoned her trousers, nudged the waist down on her left side, frowning. "...actually you can't see that one anymore — I guess the potions took care of it. I used to look more mangled than this, from burns and shite, you know. They gave me an extra healing potion when they could spare them, got rid of most of it. I'm told the ones left may or may not go away on their own." Beth shrugged, like she didn't care either way.
"There are things you can do to remove scars," Parvati offered, a low note on her voice Hermione wasn't sure how to read. "I'm not sure most of them are legal in Britain, but..."
"It's fine, it's not a big deal. Besides, the big one from the bug looks kind of wicked."
Oh, Beth, honestly...
Beth had to toe off her shoes to get her trousers off — which, again, she did with no obvious sign of shyness, seemingly unconcerned. Though, the shorts she had under did cover more than the plain cotton knickers she normally wore, silky-looking things held around by a drawstring, tied in a little bow under her navel. (They were plain, just a simple pale blue with no decoration of any kind, but they actually looked sort of nice, and more feminine than Hermione was used to seeing on Beth.) The denims fit more or less fine, though the waist was a little loose on Beth — but she just pulled the belt out of her uniform trousers, started feeding it through the loops—
"No, don't touch that!" she snapped, abruptly lurching to the side to snatch something away from Gin. Hermione was a little startled by the sudden volume and quick movement — she hadn't even noticed Gin had been reaching for the pistol.
Gin looked a bit taken aback, leaning away, her eyes wide. "I'm sorry, I... I was just curious. What is that?"
For a couple seconds, Beth just gave Gin a heavy, unamused frown. Held up in front of her, she unsnapped some kind of latch built into the holster and drew the gun out. Pointed to the side and away from anyone in the room, Hermione noticed, her fingers nowhere near the trigger. There as a beat of vaguely uncomfortable silence — the pureblood girls might not have recognised the firearm while hidden in its holster, but they definitely did now.
"...Oh. Sorry." Gin was silent for just a second, her face working, clearly couldn't help asking, the question all but blurted out. "Have you actually used that before?"
"Sure." She holstered it again, latched the flap covering it down in place, before setting it back on the counter again. "Killed one of the scabs with it once. He'd kicked my wand out of my hand — broke my fucking wrist again, bastards — and while he was taking a second to gloat like a smug idiot, bam bam bam." Beth even mimed aiming the gun with her left hand — kind of awkward and flailing, if that was supposed to be a recreation of what she'd actually done at the time she was lucky she'd managed to hit anything. "Only really used it the one time, but having it on me did save my life, so."
Hermione wasn't the only one in the room who didn't seem to know what to say to that. The thought of Beth almost dying thousands of miles away was just unnerving...
Seemingly unbothered by the unsettled silence, Beth finished changing pretty quickly from there, her uniform trousers going back in her bag, and then the leather pouches and the pistol — kept somewhere at the top, for whatever reason. (Hermione would guess so it was easily accessible if necessary, but she couldn't imagine why Beth would ever need it.) The beret didn't go in the bag, though, Beth instead shaking it out, a quick charm smoothing the material, and plopped it on her head, with a quick glance at the mirror tugged it so it was sitting more or less correctly in the stubborn mess that was her hair. She didn't actually pull on the patterned jacket, tying the arms around her waist instead. The bag was slung back over her shoulder, and Beth led the way back out of the toilets, to rejoin the rest of their group waiting outside.
Beth was immediately asked about the beret, she shrugged. "We were told by the Major back at Lyneham that we're supposed to be identifiable when in public. Not sure why, in case of emergencies or something, maybe?"
"Well, shite, I wasn't told that," Sirius said. "I thought it would be garish, walking around with that stuff when I'm not on-duty, you know. Like going out to the pub in your Auror colours, just not done. If I knew that I would have bloody well been wearing the uniform this whole time — I've learned that muggle women dig a military man, you see."
A couple giggles passing between the girls, Beth rolled her eyes. "Weren't you moved to Reserves? I'm just on leave, it's different."
"Yeah, I guess I was at that. The burden of nobility, I'm afraid, there must be— Hey wait, you're on the Wizengamot too! Why'd they keep you on?"
"I've got proxies to take care of that shite for me. Also, omniglot."
"Ugh, rub it in, why don't you..."
Now that Beth was changed and ready to go, they actually went upstairs again — they'd planned on having their picnic in Oxford, only coming as far as Swindon to pick Beth up. Their unexpected companions agreed they could come along, they climbed back up the stairs to the Oxford gate, and a few minutes later were streaming back to the other side again. However long they'd been in Swindon had been long enough for the Oxford station to clear out somewhat, much less crowded now.
The moment they stepped outside, Beth grimaced, her shoulders hunching. "Fuck, why's it so bloody cold?" There was a brief moment of confusion, because it wasn't, really — a perfectly ordinary spring day, maybe about fifteen degrees...
"It's not cold," Sirius drawled, "this is normal. You were just in bloody tropical Asia long enough you got used it being impossibly hot all the time. Give it a week, it'll feel normal again."
They paused for a moment, so Beth could set down her bag and properly pull on the fuzzy flannel jacket — hissing curses under her breath the whole time — before continuing on. Leaving the station, they followed the walk paths parallelling the Thames, after a few hundred metres coming to the parks and nature reserves south of the city. The kept following the river, looking for a comfortable place to set up their picnic, talking the whole way. Mostly, asking Beth about all the languages she'd picked up while she was gone — there were kind of a lot, turned it. Just in the brief time she was in the Congo, she'd learned Swahili and bits and pieces of other local languages, but she'd been in Vietnam (and Laos and at times Cambodia) for a lot longer, and had spoken with many more different peoples, the locals and members of foreign militaries come in to help. She'd picked up maybe another dozen languages just during her time in Indochina, easily when counting ones she'd only been familiar with before but was fluent in now. The national Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian languages, of course, but the mountainous region along the borders was shockingly diverse, she'd picked up several little minority languages, and she'd been working alongside soldiers from Soviet and Arab countries as well...
Beth's Arabic was much better than Hermione's now, sounded perfectly fluent. Though, honestly, Hermione suddenly had trouble understanding her at all — Hermione's Aunt Samiya was from Tunisia, but Beth had seemingly picked up a completely different dialect while she was away. Yeah, she'd learned it from Syrians and Iraqis, mostly, that could be quite different from Maghrebi Arabic...
(Hermione was terribly jealous of Beth's omniglot skills sometimes, but she tried not to be. When she remembered how much difficulty Beth had learning anything out of a book, it was much easier, but it was harder to remember that when she was talking about learning a dozen languages within a few months, honestly.)
They came to a suitable location eventually, everyone finding spots to plop down on the ground. The meal had been prepared with a smaller number of people in mind, of course, but that was easily solved by Sirius simply calling an elf (Cherri) and asking for some extra stuff to be brought from Ancient House. And there was another 'burden' of nobility right there: it was hardly so easy for other people to get extra food on short notice like that. Rationing had been hitting very hard the last few months — and they hadn't even seen the worst of it yet, things were going to get bad at the height of summer, the last couple months before the harvest.
The were lucky in Britain. The UK had been keeping pretty sizeable emergency food reserves ever since the Second World War, held in the event that the island was cut off from resupply during a future war — everyone understood that a third World War would be catastrophic, after all. They also benefited from magical Britain being a strongly agricultural society, with a wealth of farms and orchards and the like hidden under wards. (Great Britain and the world in general was actually a small fraction larger than they'd thought, which was so peculiar to think about.) They did have some 'industry' in the cities — in scare quotes due to the class formation and scale of production being far more similar to mediaeval trades, complete with proper guilds and apprenticeships and everything — but the distribution of the population was far more similar to pre-industrial society than the Britain Hermione had grown up in. Magical Britain was, in fact, a major food exporter. They'd be producing even more this year, due to magical fertilisation techniques being spread to muggle farmland, some plantations that had grown potion components switched to staple crops. Given the ratio of muggles to mages on the island, the mages' food surplus didn't entirely provide for the whole island, but they were hoping that expanded efforts at cultivating the land with magical techniques (not to mention the geo-engineering beetles they'd adapted from the aliens) would result in the UK being at least self-sufficient before their reserves entirely went dry. It was going to be tight, for a little while, the rationing for some products was going to get very strict, but they would make it.
Other regions of the world? Not so lucky. The lunch Mrs Weasley had been able to get her hands on was somewhat plain and basic, but it was enough. That they had enough to eat, even enough to feed some extra, unexpected companions, that Sirius could just call home for more food on a whim, that was increasingly a privilege. Having heard from Mum how bad things were getting where she was, Hermione was uncomfortably conscious of how fortunate she was.
(They might have fought off the aliens, they would survive, but the hard part wasn't actually finished yet — things were going to get bad before they got better again.)
There were sandwiches — mostly vegetables, meat being at a premium now, but there was cheese as well — and some savoury, herby biscuits that were honestly surprisingly good, the rest of the spread mostly made up of sliced vegetables and crisps with a dip, and fresh fruit, mostly berries. The fruit was probably the biggest luxury here, with the spiced honey included for dipping or to put on the biscuits, they had access to those most people didn't — the fruit was grown on Potter land, never out of season thanks to magic, and the honey was from the bees they kept to aid pollination. The dip was actually quite good, made out of beans and mushrooms slow-cooked with meat trimmings (whatever she'd had on hand), blended together with herbs and whatever else had occurred to her to add. Considering it didn't actually have any dairy in it, the texture was shockingly creamy, it was hard to believe there wasn't any cheese in this at all. Especially after Katie Bell had a thought, and Sirius hit the bowl with a warming charm, just, wow, this stuff was good, that was all.
No one could ever accuse Mrs Weasley of not being able to cook, or not knowing how to do a lot with a little — the Weasleys were relatively poor, after all, she was likely accustomed to working with limited ingredients. Their lunch was relatively basic, all things considered, but when one was eating with the Weasleys that was always only relatively speaking.
There was a lot of babble going on around her, Hermione mostly only listening and not talking much. She'd never been particularly adept at, well, socialising like a competent human being. These days she was better at it than she used to be, but she did best with small numbers of people — there became a point where there was just too much going on, and she had trouble deciding when to speak and what she was supposed to be responding to. The conversation was mostly silly nonsense anyway. If she had to guess, everyone was trying to keep the topics light, as much as they could, to not be too dour and serious on Beth's return to the country. Gossip about classmates from school, what everyone was up to, funny stories from the homeschooling group Lavender and the Patils were in — Hogwarts might be starting up again in the fall, but they weren't certain about that yet — or the silly hijinks that Katie and her fellow trainees got up to. (She'd joined an organisation Hermione understood was a defence militia sort of thing — definitely military, but not meant to be sent overseas.) Hermione didn't have much to contribute, at least that wouldn't quickly lead back to the war, so she mostly remained quiet, occasionally offering a comment or correction, complimenting Mrs Weasley on the dip and the bread (mostly baked herself, with occasional help from the Potter elves), really very good...
She noticed Beth spent a lot of time just quietly eating and listening, which wasn't unusual — she'd never been much better at socialising like a competent human being than Hermione was. She did contribute some, asking or joking about one thing or another, offering some talk about people she'd met while she was away. It seemed like Beth was also avoiding directly talking about the fighting, keeping to light topics. One bloke in her troop constantly misplacing his boots, another who'd been so terribly bored he'd made his own deck of cards to play with, composed entirely of risqué drawings of women. (The suits were different — Hermione was certain they were all meant to be innuendos, but Beth didn't linger on it.) Hedwig making people uncomfortable by acting very peculiar sometimes, this one pair at the shelter she'd stayed at dancing around each other as long as they were trapped underground, but it was only a few days later that they were caught screwing off in the (dead) forest...
Alicia jokingly asked if that was just envy, or if she'd been screwed out in the woods too. Pointedly, Beth failed to answer that question, just took a bite out of her sandwich instead as the girls giggled, her cheeks going noticeably pink — which, unless Hermione was very much mistaken, meant the answer was yes. That was a...weird thought. Given how long and difficult it'd been for Beth to get to a point that she was comfortable even just with an occasional hug, it was hard to believe that she'd somehow started having sex over the last few months. She guessed it was possible — it'd been a while, and Beth had been in close quarters with people in intense circumstances, things just happened sometimes — but it was still peculiar to think about. It was difficult to imagine Beth with a boyfriend, just, as prickly as she could be sometimes, Hermione had trouble seeing how that would work. It wasn't her business, of course, but.
Though it was curious that Beth had never mentioned it. All the letters they'd sent back and forth, and it'd never come up. Hermione didn't know how to feel about that. Of course, it wasn't her business — and, as prickly as Beth could be, it was probably a sensitive subject. She guessed Beth would tell her about it when she was ready to.
It was just, she hadn't seen Beth since September. It'd been a long time, things had happened, Beth was different. Subtly, of course, it was hardly as though an entirely different person had come back home in her place, but...
She realised how serious of an emergency the invasion had been, that sacrifices had to be made — and this was a small one, all things considered. But, that they'd been on opposite sides of the planet for so long, that Hermione had missed things, suddenly that thought was making her feel terribly sad.
On impulse, she reached for Beth's hand, laid splayed out on the grass, and covered it with hers. Beth twitched, turned to glance her way, one eyebrow arching. "Hmm?"
"Nothing, you... I'm glad you're back." Hermione had to force a smile — she wasn't lying, obviously, it was great to have Beth back, it was just...complicated. "I missed you."
Beth watched her for a second Then her hand turned under Hermione's, fingers linking with hers. "I missed you too. Vietnam's a bloody long way away, and... Well, you know how much I like reading and writing."
With a more natural smile this time, Hermione just said, "Yeah. Does your omniglottalism work through radio?" Not just learning things, but she was aware from previous conversations that things just didn't feel quite right to Beth if it wasn't in person. Not quite right how, Hermione wasn't sure, but.
"No, only works in person. My mind stuff has to be able to touch their mind stuff."
"Hmm..."
Hermione was temporarily distracted considering whether it was theoretically possible to create a variation on crystal radio that would transmit magic — she didn't see why not, theoretically, though it was possible the mage's control would be broken across the boundary — by the time she checked back in the conversation had moved on. Talking about quidditch, apparently. There were a lot of quidditch people here, so why not, she guessed. Seemed like when (or whether) quidditch games would start up again was a rather frivolous concern, but oh well. People were allowed to care about silly things occasionally.
Their picnic went on, conversation bouncing topic to topic, Beth keeping a hold on Hermione's hand all the while.