Chapter 3: Breaking the world (for beginners)

Graham's first impression of Godric's Hollow was that its mantelpiece clearly needed to be higher if James and Lily weren't planning on having all of their guests brain themselves on their way out of the floo. After James' raucous laughter and Lily's fussing over him died down and he was steered to a seat by the kitchen table, however, his second impression was of a house very much loved by its owners.

Although Lily told him that it had only been built after the second world war, it appeared that James' flair for transfiguration had created a place which could just as well have been a venerable family home: while the resplendent oak beams which bore the weight of the ceiling could have been James' initiative, the understated pastels and tastefully appointed fixtures seemed more likely to be the result of Lily exerting a degree of stylistic sanity over her husband. James, after all, had never shied away from employing the most horrific palettes imaginable in his pranking career at Hogwarts.

Despite his former pranking pursuits, James' adoring gaze as he watched Lily busy herself in preparing tea for the three of them suggested it was just about possible that he'd managed to mature a little after three years with Lily; it was certainly a transition from the veritable cold war that their relationship had – at least outwardly - been in Graham's last year at Hogwarts.

"So – oh, thanks, Lils." James began, taking the cup of tea Lily offered him. "What's this whole idea of yours about? Lily told me it was some revolutionary plan to change the world, but that's not exactly specific – she said you'd probably want to tell me yourself?" He grinned at the sight of Graham staring incredulously at Lily, who had the decency to blush a little.

"Well, in my defence, I thought he wouldn't believe it unless it came from someone who really knew what he was talking about!" Lily offered weakly, though by this point, Graham was smiling as well.

"Alright, then. So, James – do you know how babies are made?" Asked Graham, drawing James' amused retort that "I would have to be pretty damned stupid or lucky if I had this" - he pointed at Lily - "on the way without realising! Um, the baby, I mean, Lils. I'm obviously lucky to have you, who I love and care for very much."

"Okay, okay – no, I know, but it's worth asking that to preface my next question: did you know that Muggles recently discovered a way to do that without the man?" He waggled his eyebrows at James, and grinned at him.

James snorted. "Piss off," he replied, "Lily's taught me about eckletricity and robits and firelegs and all that muggle stuff, and I know how it works enough to know that that's definitely impossible."

Lily put her face into her hands, and Graham raised his eyebrows even further, his grin widening.

James paled. "Oh, Merlin, Longshaw. You're actually serious? That's disgusting! I mean, how the hell does that even actually work – and why would anyone even do that?" His pale face took on a worryingly verdant tone. "So, uh, how does it work? Is it one of those robits, or some kind of a -" he cut himself off, shaking his head. "Actually, just tell me what this is all about. I'm happy to take your word for it."

After a brief reassurance that the process wasn't nearly as sinister as anything which James' imagination was probably conjuring, Graham explained the wide scope of his plan to James, while Lily filled in to explain the spells she'd spent the week working on and how they fit into the plan. James' revulsion had quickly turned to curiosity and interest, but his initial excitement had faded to introspection by the time Graham had finished his explanation.

"Well, I can't deny that it'd be a prank to shake the ages, make no mistake – If you think about it in number terms, there'd end up being ten times as many wizards as there are now in a hundred years, if not more when your new wizards and witches have kids of their own. And yeah, I'm not going to say that the idea of more wands on our side isn't a good one -" (Graham looked away in slight embarrassment as James said this) "- but the fact of the matter is that, as it is right now, I don't know if the Wizarding world could cope with this many new wizards coming along at once."

Graham frowned. "Well, yes, but that's sort of the point – I mean, to really get things to change by soft power, so to speak -" James cut him off, shaking his head.

"No, no, no. I get that – and the idea's interesting, to say the least. But think of it this way: how many new wands does Ollivander make in a year? Because it's not thousands; I know from my dad that it can take him a few days to make a wand, and for all that your prospective wizards could be brilliantly talented, it's pretty damned likely that, if there was a wand shortage, they'd be the ones that ended up with the short straws."

James grimaced, brushing his hair out of his eyes distractedly. "And that'd would go for being allowed to go to Hogwarts, being allowed to get jobs, not being targeted by You-Know-Who, and so on for basically everything. If you get thousands of wizards and witches to be recognised in society, with enough training that they're not vulnerable any more, then that'll be brilliant – I've just got no bloody idea how you'd get there. You'd need to do more than just getting them to be born, anyway."

Any protest that Graham might have had at James' critique had died in his throat as James laid out his problems with Graham's plan; an uncomfortable silence fell on the three of them, until James abruptly drained his mug of tea, banging it down onto the table once it was empty, a glint in his eye.

"Don't be so glum, Graham, Lils – I wasn't trying to shut all of your plans down! What I'm getting at is a key principle of the noble art that is pranking – when you think it's not going to work, you've got to make your plans bigger. Why do you think that all of the pranks that those geniuses, the Marauders, - who will remain unnamed - perpetrated at Hogwarts were so insane and incredible?" (Lily rolled her eyes.) "It's because whenever obstacles got in the way, they went straight through them like a charmed knife through butter, making their plans grander and crazier until the obstacles stopped mattering. What I'm saying is, this idea needs to be bigger if it's going to work; you're going to need to plan your way through these obstacles if you're planning on doing more than just creating a giant underclass of wizards that'll have the same lot – or worse – that muggleborns do right now."

Lily's face slowly lost its dubious expression as James continued, green eyes lighting up in excitement.

"So, things like making sure that new magic children know what they're getting into before they get to Hogwarts, finding new ways to get them wands, supplies, and so on, making sure that they actually get a magical education before Hogwarts, and making sure that they're safe from He-who-must-not-be-named. Those wouldn't be bad ideas on their own if we just applied them to muggleborns in general; and we wouldn't even need the ministry's magic-born registry to find where these new magicals are, we could just use the sperm bank's own records!"

This was an opportune moment for Graham to cut in.

"Well, I think we actually are going to need that magic-born registry, even if we could track people down without it. Think about it this way: if Voldemort does win, or even if he's just got decently informed eyes and ears in the ministry, he's going to hear about what we'll be doing a bit more than 9 months after we start, and do..." he trailed off, and James finished his sentence.

"Bad things, yeah? I get your point. So what's your plan?"

Graham grimaced. "Well, in all honesty, my plan is basically you."

There were a couple of seconds of confusion as his hosts processed this, before Lily gasped. "You mean-"

"Unfortunately, I do. If this is going to work, we need someone who knows the ministry, and won't raise eyebrows by being there, to get their hands on the record. From the research I've done, nobody at the ministry knows exactly how the registry works – it records information every time a child first uses accidental magic, but without that they only have the Trace to, uh, trace magic. And if we take it away from the ministry, the first time they'll be able to identify new wizards and witches will be by Hogwarts letters, when they go out. If this is going to work, we have to get the book – I'm amazed that You-Know-Who hasn't made a move on it already, in honesty."

Graham watched the silent conversation that followed between James and Lily, which – despite taking only a few seconds – seemed to go on for much longer. Finally, Lily sighed, and twitched her wand at the teapot, which obligingly refilled her mug.

"It's a lot that you're asking, you know." Lily demurred, staring into her tea. "The ministry's security is pretty tight; I understand that you're asking James for that exact reason."

"And I'm going to do it." James met Graham's eyes, and grinned at him. "I've not pulled one over the ministry yet – so why don't I start with something big?"

And with that, the rest of the afternoon was lost to plotting, until the kitchen was streaked with shadow and sunset faded into twilight. By the time Graham left, happily sated by the meal which James' effortless spellwork had ushered into being while the three of them talked, he had the distinct feeling that his idea was, by some miracle, about to worm its way into reality.

March passed into April, its early spell of good weather giving way to the temperamental showers which characterised the season. The ministry captured four death eaters – a much-needed success story – and Voldemort retaliated by derailing a train near Birmingham, coincidentally providing an excuse for the muggle government to advance its plans to privatise the railways out of the demonstrably unsafe hands of the public sector. Beyond these events, however, a plan which would change the world was, very quietly, being put into motion.

Instead of preparing for the year of experimental work which he was meant to start in the Trinity term, Graham had quickly decided that he was going to confund his supervisor into giving him a good – if not remarkable – mark. He was going to need the time and thought-space that medicinal research would otherwise have taken up.

Part of that thought-space was consumed supervising the brewing of an obscure branch of the polyjuice potion which had long been discarded as pointless. One of the many horror stories which Graham had learned about when he'd been studying to be a healer was what happened to children who had been conceived during the brief trend in the late 1800s for couples to use polyjuice potion to paper over the cracks which infirmity and unattractiveness opened up in relationships; the children that resulted grew up looking increasingly similar to their polyjuiced parents, and the paternity tests which followed gave the first – and last – professional polyjuice model the shock of his life when he discovered that he was, by blood relation (and hence, Graham suspected, by genetics), the sudden father of seventeen children.

Given this obscure knowledge, Graham had chosen to brew the mutatis mutandis variant, which caused the user to take on a random appearance – originally created as a surveillance tool, until its users realised that each subsequent use would transform them into a different person, making it impossible to maintain any single disguise. On the same basis, he expected, treating any donations with a diluted dose would shake things up enough to ensure a diversity of gene-pool, and avoid the awkward situation of a magical world where half the population were siblings.

Polyjuice only really needed to be supervised semi-regularly, however, and Graham used the rest of the time to brush up on his notice-me-not and disillusion charms, before using them to scout BPAS' London clinic, which housed the nation's only sperm bank, and reporting back to Lily with everything he learned; if he hadn't been about to subvert the entire basis of the system and render his knowledge somewhat irrelevant, it would have been a salutary and informative way for a doctor-in-training to spend a few weeks.

Lily, on the other hand, was hard at work preparing for her wedding, which – after being forced to fend off an attempt by James and friends to co-opt the process from her to "save her from the stress" – she was enjoying immensely. Outside that, though, she had also been working on the problem which Graham had asked her to resolve – creating the actual mechanism that would underpin his whole system. Predictably, she'd realised, Graham's proposed solution had been incredibly overcomplicated – he'd always preferred the sledgehammer approach to the scalpel one, which should have been something of a problem given that he wanted to be a doctor. His plan had involved confundus wards which would have the doctors making mistakes, throwing away the wrong sort of donations and unwittingly substituting in the ones they wanted; beyond this, they'd need to regularly sneak into the facility to maintain stock, all while ensuring that no muggle authority became suspicious or caught sight of staff doing their work incompetently.

Lily had taken one look at those plans and decided that it was a good thing that Graham had got in touch with her after all. Her solution was far simpler than Graham's. After samples had been taken and placed in one of the several storage cabinets at the clinic, a particularly clever ward – carefully inscribed in several locations by Graham under her instructions – would vanish the contents of a donated vial, then use a switching spell to replace it with a magical sample, stored under preservative spells elsewhere, instead – a process which meant that the way which the muggles ran the clinic would be largely unaffected by their plan. The layering of a very weak notice-me-not charm (Lily liked to think of it as a "Somebody Else's Problem" charm) on top of this ensured that even a vigilant nurse or doctor would simply lose interest in any questions which this process might somehow raise. It was, all in all, a brilliant piece of spell-work for its subtlety; as Professor Flitwick had told Lily, who had been one of his favourite students, the true test of a charms master was not in doing something incredible, but in making it seem as if they were barely making an effort to do anything at all.

By the middle of April, and several weeks ahead of schedule, Graham and Lily realised that everything they needed to prepare was ready. Graham just needed to activate the wards at the clinic, once more under cover of notice-me-not. So it was that, with a strange sense of anticlimax quite unsuitable to a plan to revolutionise the world, a press of Graham's wand to Lily's ward and a muttered Incipio set everything in motion, giving Graham and Lily about nine months to work out how they were going to do literally everything else which they needed to.

Any celebration that Graham might have planned was cut short when, just after apparating back to his flat, he was surprised by the phone ringing; he had after all been talking to Lily just a few minutes before, and she was his only regular caller.

He picked up the receiver, and was surprised to hear the panicked voice of Jessica on the other side.

"Oh, Christ alive, Graham, thank Merlin you're there – Dave just caught me doing my hair with a wand, and he's asking me what the hell's going on, oh God, oh God, I didn't think anybody could see me, and-" She was taking deep, gasping breaths, her voice trembling every few words in panic.

"Jess, it's going to be okay, yeah? Stay calm. You knew that this conversation needed to happen at some point – it's just going to be now, and I'm going to help, so don't worry, okay? Are you on your own right now?" Graham was trying to keep his voice level, but he couldn't entirely prevent his nerves from seeping through; he'd hoped that he and Jessica would have been able to properly plan the revelation.
"Yes, for now. I told Dave I needed to make a call, and he's upstairs in his room-" Graham cut her off.

"Right; you need to apparate here, so you can side-along me back with you; we're going to have this talk together, so don't worry. Okay?" He waited just long enough to hear her agree, then hung up the phone, and rushed back to his room to grab the bag of magical knick-knacks and toys which he'd accumulated over his time at Hogwarts. Hearing a loud pop, he went back into the living room, where Jessica was leaning against the wall, eyes clenched shut, gasping for breath.

"Jess, it's going to be alright – I promise." Graham patted her shoulder consolingly, and Jessica looked up to meet his eyes, doing her best to give him a shaky grin.

"What've you got there?" She asked, looking at the tote bag which he had on his shoulder.

"Just a few learning aids," he reassured her, "to show Dave some fun things about magic once we've broken the news. Are you ready?"

Jessica nodded, and, taking his arm, steeled herself, and spun the two of them out of their living room and into David's – where, having come downstairs to check on Jessica, the sight of his friends appearing out of thin air naturally caused him to faint dead away.

Mornings for David were typically a slow-run affair, in which half an hour could pass between becoming conscious and finally making the reluctant decision to get out of bed. As he heard a voice from what felt like a long way away mutter "Rennervate", though, he had the bizarre sensation of transitioning from total unconsciousness to complete awareness without stopping on the way.

"What the hell's going o– wait, how are you even here, Graham?" David became aware that his head was resting on Jessica's lap, and Graham was leaning against his bedroom wall.

Graham did not immediately answer his question.

"David – did you ever wonder why Jess and I have always been so cagey about the boarding school we went to before Oxford?"

"Yeah - and why an orphan could even afford to get into a private school in the first place, and a hell of a lot more besides – wait, hold on. Seriously, what the HELL is happening? How are you here – I thought I saw you appear out of bloody nowhere!" He sat up, and looked to Jessica. "What – what's happening, Jess? Did I have a nervous breakdown or something?"

For a second, the temptation to lie to David flickered across Jessica's face, before she sighed and looked down at her boyfriend.

"No, you haven't had a breakdown, David. But I need to tell you something I should have told you about months ago. You know what you saw a few minutes ago – when my hair was tying itself into a plait?"

At his hesitant nod, Graham took up the conversational baton.

"It wasn't a trick of the eye, Dave. This is going to seem insane, but, well - Orchideous!" he flourished his wand, and a bouquet of tulips burst from its tip, which he placed into a mug on the bedside table, "- the truth is that we're both wizards, which means that we're able to do all kinds of magic - all the way up to turning princesses into frogs."

"Or turning cups into vases," Jessica continued, doing just that to the tulips' receptacle.

David looked from Jessica to Graham in shock. "Um, guys. I know what's possible and what's not possible, and on the basis that actually doing what you just did is impossible, you're pulling some kind of ludicrous, nonsensical trick on me for some insane reason."

Again, Graham saw Jessica's face twist in agony before it settled once more into resolve.

"Dave, love, I hate lying, and I really, really hate lying to you – so I'm going to be direct."

She pointed her wand at a book on David's table, which began to morph endlessly – for a second, it was a mouse, before it became an hourglass, then a toucan. As it continued to flow from shape to shape, she turned her head away and looked at David, who was transfixed by the display.

"Graham and I were both born to normal families – our parents were like yours, and Graham's brother is like you. But we were born with the ability to do magic; and when we were eleven, we were told that there was a separate magical world, hiding in the cracks of the one we live in; a world filled with wonderful things -" the book was a star, glowing with a soft inner light - "- and horrible ones." She lowered her wand, leaving a grinning skull in the place of the book, before a final swish of her wand left the book lying there again, none worse for wear.

"And that world's been kept secret from the mu– from the real world for over a thousand years." Graham continued, as David continued to stare at the book. "The first thing that we were told when we arrived at the school where we learned magic was that we had to keep it a secret, from everyone that we knew. If we told anyone, our wands would be snapped, and we'd be made to forget that magic had ever existed at all."

"And the only exception to that rule – the only one which won't bring the cudgel of the law down on our heads – is that you're allowed to tell your spouse about magic if they're a mug- sorry, a non-magic person, which the wizards call a muggle. I was going to tell you after we got engaged, but, well, you saw me today." Jessica finished.

The ensuing silence stretched for nearly five minutes, as David stared blankly at nothing; neither Jessica nor Graham felt able to break it. Finally, David spoke again, still not looking at either of them.

"I have a few questions which I want you to answer for me." He began, his voice subdued. Seeing Jessica's nod, he continued:

"Does this magic stuff mean you've made a pact with the devil?" ("No, there's no such thing as far as magic knows.")

"Okay – what about demons, occultism, anything? Are you pagans?" ("I don't think there's really any religion to it, though we might have celebrated Samhain at school?")

"...can anyone learn to be a wizard?" ("I think it's something genetic.")

These questions carried on for a few minutes, as Graham and Jessica filled David in on the basics of their education, how many wizards there were, and some other general trivia. Finally, though, David turned to Jessica, and asked one final question.

"Have you ever used your magic to -" His voice hitched, "- to do anything to me? Change how I feel, what I think?"

Jessica's face crinkled in sympathy. "I swear, Dave – I've never, I could never-"

"And how can I believe that?!" David leapt to his feet, gripped by a sudden fury. "You're both these, these... insane magical people who can do anything they can imagine, so how do I know you haven't, I don't know, made me love you? How can I trust anything I know about you?" Jessica shook her head violently as he laid down his accusations, but it was Graham who quietly responded to them a moment later.

"You can trust your feelings because you're feeling as angry as you do now, Dave. You're right – there are terrible, powerful potions and spells which can make you want to do anything that the person who used them on you wants you to do. But they're not subtle things. They wouldn't let you squabble about essays, and they definitely wouldn't let you be afraid that you were being influenced by them. Jess loves you, mate – and I know that you love her too, and that's as real as anything ever was."

David looked at Jessica, who was staring at her feet, for a moment which seemed to stretch out for far longer than it had any right to. Finally, though, he sighed, and turned back to Graham.

"Can you go outside, please? You can wait in the living room or something, I don't care– my parents are out, anyway – but I need to talk to Jess on her own. Please. Thank you"

Graham looked to Jessica, who indicated that this was fine by her, and made his way downstairs, sinking into an overstuffed armchair as he waited on the quiet conversation upstairs that was just beyond his hearing. Exhaustion from the conversation and the day preceding it seized him, and he slipped into sleep.

Nearly an hour passed before David came down to the living room, and shook Graham awake – more roughly, thought Graham, squinting at his assailant through bleary eyes, than was strictly necessary. David grinned at him, beckoning him to come upstairs.

"So, Jessica tells me that you've got a box of magic gizmos to show me? Because I want to know everything..."