Chapter 12: Foundational Studies

"Would all passengers please stow their tray tables and re-fasten their seatbelts to prepare for landing?"

It had taken a particularly bumpy flight over the Pacific to remind Graham of his long-forgotten fear of flying, and, after a day of uncomfortable travel, he was more than ready to return to the literal and metaphorical terra firma of England. After participating in the shared disgruntlement that all economy class passengers feel as he waited for the business class passengers to disembark, and the subsequent irritation of an hour spent queueing at passport control, it was with considerable relief that Graham stole away into a toilet stall, shrunk his luggage, and apparated home.

Although he had expected as much success from the spell as anything else that Lily had recorded in her book of household charms, Graham was still enormously gratified to discover that Lockwood was in the same condition he'd kept it in, down to the still-fresh groceries he'd left in the pantry. He'd asked Remus to keep him appraised of any particularly pressing developments, and to go through any owl mail that he received on his behalf (not that he'd expected much on that front), so he was able to enjoy a fairly leisurely afternoon and a full eight hours of dreamless-sleep rest to counteract his jet-leg before he re-immersed himself in the tasks which faced him.

Sure enough, as they'd arranged, Remus arrived the next morning, looking in reasonable nick, with a surprisingly organised agenda for the two of them to go over.

"You do realise that you didn't have to go to all this trouble, right?" Graham asked, dryly, as he skimmed through the documents that Remus had handed him. "I mean, much as I'd like to be able to, I'm not paying you or anything."

Remus waved away his complaints, though.

"Well, no, you aren't paying me." He said. "But, because of my condition, it's quite a struggle to find work in the magical world – most of the contracts for employment are magically binding and I'd have to disclose I was a werewolf to sign them, which would make the offer void in any case. So Sirius decided that I should become an employee of – whatever this is going to be – and he's been bankrolling me. Sorry for not asking you first!"

"Sirius?" Graham asked, frowning. "Is he making that much money as an auror?"

To his surprise, Remus laughed, rummaged in his pocket for a scrap of newspaper, and passed it to Graham, who saw that it was an obituary for Walburga Black, fondly remembered in the article as a pillar of the wizarding community who'd stood up for the old ways in a 'difficult transitional time for the community', which is to say, that she had been a bigot who'd been too polite to openly support you-know-who.

"Sirius inherited everything from the old crone." Remus explained, still smirking. "After he was put in prison, Walburga figured he'd been a double agent for You-know-who, and repatriated him – but she never got round to fixing her mistake after he was released, so the Malfoys – Narcissa Malfoy was the next legitimate Black in line, you see – didn't get a penny when she died. I hear that Lucius is beyond furious."

"Well, obviously I don't mind at all," said Graham, "though this is all quite sudden. Shall we get down to business?

It transpired that Remus had been a very busy man indeed in the time that Graham had been gone. He had been documenting all the new wizards and witches that were being born (almost seventy new magical manifestations in that time suggested that the plan was still well underway), and had enchanted a copy of the A-Z Road Atlas to mark their locations ("I've quite a lot of experience with this sort of thing." he explained to Graham, although he didn't explain why that was). He'd also come up with preliminary ideas for lessons, something Graham had also been thinking about, and they spent some time batting ideas back and forth. His big idea, though, was his proposal for a pilot scheme.

"There are only going to be sixty wizards or so in Harry's year, like any other normal year – of which maybe ten or fifteen will be muggleborn. It's a good number to try out the sort of things we teach and to give ourselves time to tweak whatever syllabus we come up with." Remus pointed out. "I mean, we should be making the teething process as painless as possible."

"I couldn't agree more." Graham said. "But the one thing I would say is that if we'll be starting a year early, we need to sort out how we'll be funding this enterprise. For all that I'm grateful for Sirius' help, I really don't like the idea of using him to bankroll us, and there are pretty significant costs we'll need to be able to meet."

"We'll need four teachers, for a start." Remus said, shuffling through his papers to find his prospective syllabus. "And potentially even more on top of that for every subsequent year of students, depending on how we time and organise lessons. All that won't come cheap."

"Plus food, equipment, potentially the cost of some house-elves to help things out, and so on – like you say, not cheap." Graham concluded. "Luckily, though, I've had an idea of my own."

It had taken quite a few drinks and some rather heartfelt conversations, but Graham and his brother had reconciled while he had been away, and Graham had been able to catch up on his brother's life. He'd always been more hands-on than Graham, so it was no great surprise that his brother had gone into the construction industry, and he had mentioned how much money some of his clients were making by buying, renovating, and re-selling properties.

"The way I see it, it's a pretty simple concept." he said, passing some before-and-after photos he'd purloined in New Zealand over to Remus. "We buy decrepit properties through a muggle company, do them up in a muggle-appropriate way, and sell them on."

Remus had not been raised in the muggle world, so the concept was rather strange to him. If a wizard needed something done to their house, they would buy a book of spells, and do it themselves; while wizarding architects made good money designing properties and their ward schemes, there wasn't really such a thing as a construction industry.

"I don't see how that'll let us pay our way." He said, dubiously. "I mean, how much money can you get for repairing a house for muggles – a few hundred galleons? That's not going to help us very much."

Graham gave an involuntary snort of laughter, and shook his head. "More like ten thousand galleons or more, depending on the size of the house. Muggle home renovation is much, much more expensive than the wizarding equivalent."

"Well, I've clearly been in the wrong line of work, then – wizarding jobs are rubbish compared to that." said Remus, faintly shocked. "And you're sure none of this will look suspicious?"

"We might need to wait a little while before selling to avoid scrutiny, and we'll have to use some of the money to pay for a muggle lawyer, a surveyor, and so on." said Graham, thoughtfully. "But we won't be breaking any laws, or even the statute, so long as we're quite careful about things – so no, I don't think it'll be a problem – and we'll be running Lockwood as a summer school, so we can have an off-season to raise money."

"If you're sure." Remus repeated, still feeling a little dubious. "So – how do we get started?"

The way that they got started, it transpired, was by getting back in touch with Delia Thistle, the muggleborn witch who Graham had looked after when she'd been laid low by a vicious muscle-atrophying curse in the last months of the war. She had just returned to front-line service as the war ended, so Graham was relieved to discover that she was still well, though she was a little suspicious at the prospect of a job which Graham set out for her when he called her later that day.

"I don't understand the target market, Graham." she said, dubiously. "You're perfectly smart, and I'd fancy myself a decent teacher – but we're – well, not the right sort."

"Well, I can explain, of course. But -" Graham winced, "it has to be confidential. As in, you'll need to sign a binding agreement before I explain more. I promise, really, that it'll be worth it. You can name a meeting place, if you like, and we can talk things through there?"

Delia met Graham later that afternoon, and eventually agreed to sign a minor binding agreement – no more dangerous than the ones they'd learned in their NEWTS in Charms, but it meant that Delia (who Graham remembered being just the slightest bit vain about her appearance at Hogwarts) would be subjected to a variety of embarrassing hexes and a pretty serious befuddlement jinx that'd confuse her story if she tried to spill the beans on purpose without Graham's consent.

Only then was Graham comfortable enough to explain the details of his proposal to Delia. To his surprise, she accepted the scope of his plans with surprising understanding, after clearing up a few questions and scepticisms ("You're seriously saying that you have a single vial of, uh, sample, which is constantly transforming due to, what, a defective polyjuice variant, that replicates to replace any other sample taken in the facility, and that actually works?" she'd asked, disbelievingly, only partially placated by his explanation of Lily's scheme). However, she'd kept up with the muggle news well enough that she was at least aware of the basic principles behind the idea.

It didn't take long for Delia to become quite enthusiastic at the prospect of being able to teach; it was something she'd been looking to do ever since she'd graduated Hogwarts, and it had been her personal frustration that there was as little provision in the Wizarding world for her to do so as there was for Graham to be a healer (although she was restricted by social norms, not by legislation). On the other hand, she did have some questions about the whole scheme which Graham hadn't even considered.

"It's all very well that you're inducting all these new families into the magical world, but have you thought about how you're actually going to keep them secret?" She asked, thoughtfully. "Just because you explain that the parents and kids need to keep it a secret doesn't mean they will – especially the children. Kids love to be special, you know – weren't you desperate to tell your friends about magic?"

It was a troubling question for Graham to confront, because he remembered how much he'd hated being teased by his old schoolfriends for going to a 'special school for the gifted'; his brother had seethed and resented his presence at home during the summer, and he'd tended to become some bullies' target of convenience when he'd been let outside to play. It was only the dire warnings that Hogwarts had made about revealing the existence of magic that kept him from boasting about just how 'gifted' he was to these old friends when he'd felt particularly isolated.

"Honestly, I haven't thought about it yet." Graham said, rather embarrassed. "Beyond the basics of warning them, that is."

"Well, it doesn't need to be complicated," Delia replied, amused at his discomfort. "Impress the importance of secrecy on the parents – lie to them, even, and tell them that if they're found out revealing the existence of magic they might have their memories wiped and children taken away, which they'll be desperate not to happen if they've struggled so much to conceive as to try a sperm bank. We should teach the children about secrecy directly, of course, but the most important thing is to convince the parents, because they'd do most of the work for us after we show how important secrecy is."

"We?" Graham asked, rather pleased at her deigning to include herself in this proposed course of action.

"Well, I don't mean to be presumptive, or anything," Delia said, blushing a little, "but you're clearly interested enough to reveal some pretty hefty secrets, and I think I can handle whatever job interview you could throw at me. I mean, I actually studied for a supplementary degree in muggle teaching when I graduated from Hogwarts, which I doubt many other candidates have done."

Graham paused for a moment, deciding that he didn't need to mention how narrow his recruiting pool was, before saying, "No, not as such – though of course we'd need to have a proper talk about what you could bring to the table before we take any steps."

Internally, though, he was feeling rather impressed. He hadn't thought about training to be a teacher – but the omission suddenly seemed a glaring one. Just knowing a lot about magic, after all, didn't actually qualify you to teach it, especially to children.

"Anyway," he continued, after a moment. "I'm sure you'll want a tour of our facilities. Care to join me on a trip to Devon?"

Delia was suitably impressed by Lockwood manor, and Remus was quite taken by Delia's qualifications when they met (although Graham recalled the rumours that Remus had harboured something of a crush on her at Hogwarts, and privately found his effusive praise of the older witch rather amusing). Before the end of the day, they'd agreed on a provisional contract of employment going forwards – Delia hadn't been hugely enthralled by the prospect of spending time working on household maintenance, but she'd been bolstered by the fact that her potential salary would dwarf the meagre income she was earning as a stock potion brewer, and so she happily agreed to join Graham and Remus in their enterprise as soon as she could give notice to her old employers.

In the meantime, Graham and Remus got to work converting one of the rooms in the manor at Lockwood to an office, before taking some time to puzzle over the requirements needed to set up a muggle company in England. Eventually, after a short meeting with a lawyer from the sleepy muggle town a few miles away from Lockwood, Graham became the new director of 'Longshaw Properties Limited', feeling more than a little bit bemused by the rules that the lawyer had told him he'd now have to obey in that role. Remus had wisely decided to leave the legalese to him, and had instead spent his time poring through a selection of property magazines which Graham had picked up for him.

Sure enough, he'd found a few sites in a particularly advanced state of disrepair; it only took another trip to the local law firm to arrange the conveyancing of a purchase and a couple of weeks spent waiting for completion, and Graham found himself the new owner of the shell of a farmhouse, left untouched since its last owners had died in the fifties. His lawyer had quietly confided in him that it was quite an ambitious project for such a new company to undertake, but Graham had confidently rebuffed him.

"Alright, Graham – I've set up the muggle-repelling ward, so we should be good to go." Remus called, trudging up the track which led away from the house. "Are you ready?"

"As I'll ever be," Graham replied, rolling up his sleeves. "Shall we?"

Remus shrugged, and a couple of spells later, was at work re-setting the walls – the surveyor had said it would be prohibitively expensive to remedy the various structural flaws in the property, but Graham watched, pleased, as months of work flew by in the space of minutes, bricks wriggling into new, more stable places, while the assorted greenery which had accrued over decades of disrepair ripped itself out of the building and tumbled to the ground.

Meanwhile, Graham circled the building, vanished the rotting windows and replaced them with newly conjured oak frames, and, with a muttered "Refenestro vitriam", began to transfigure new glass for the windows, watching with pleasure as it flowed, liquid-like, to fill the frames he'd made. It was easy to forget, he thought, just how magical magic really was – occasionally being reminded of that fact was one of the few privileges he felt that he'd derived from his non-magical upbringing.

A few hours passed in this way, and, by the time that they stopped for lunch, Remus and Graham were able to enjoy it in the new dining room they'd just created in accordance with what the style catalogue Graham had brought with him had called the 'new Scandinavian mode'.

"I can see how this will have the biggest profit margin," said Remus, taking a bite of his sandwich, "but the longer I think about it, the more I see what we're doing being more widely applicable."

He swallowed, thinking, and continued. "I mean. Look at this table we're eating off, for example. It's a lovely beech, the pattern follows the grain of the wood, it looks sanded and varnished, and so on. And you transfigured it in about five seconds, right? But how much would it sell for, to muggles, that is?"

"Tables aren't luxury goods, obviously." said Graham, thoughtfully. "but I think I understand what you're getting at. Wizards seem to think that they'd need a philosopher's stone to create something for nothing – in fact, a competent wizard with a wand should basically be set for life without lifting a finger, if he knows how to palm things off to the muggles."

"I just feel a bit embarrassed by it." Remus confessed, blushing. "I was never – well, even when I was happy in school, I thought it had to be downhill from there. Dumbledore let me go to Hogwarts, but he told me that, you know, in return, he might need me to – infiltrate the packs, if the need arose, and it terrified me, but I didn't think I really had another choice if I wanted to make a living, and I did owe him – but if I knew I could have lived as comfortably as I liked doing this stuff, I reckon I'd have been a much happier child."

They were both silent for a few moments.

"You do know that it was wrong for Dumbledore to have solicited you like that, Remus?" Graham asked, carefully. "He was in a position of power over you, just like he was over all the muggleborns he enticed into the Order, and I reckon that he abused that authority."

"Dumbledore had every damn right to ask!" Remus snapped, to Graham's surprise. "He wasn't just a teacher, he was a general, and he had an asset in me which he needed to use. And I was fine with that, and I wouldn't be the man I am if I hadn't been!"

"I wasn't trying to offend," Graham offered, weakly, "only, you were just a child, and he expected-"

"We were all just children." Remus interrupted, irritated. "But some of us decided to fight, because we knew that we couldn't just run away from it all and pretend that the war wasn't happening."

Graham stiffened at the insult. He did not like being called a coward.

"And some of us saw people just like us being slaughtered, and realised that being part of a fight isn't quite as much fun when you're the sort that gets killed more than captured!" He snapped back, reserve forgotten. "You know that, right?"

"What, that standing up for the light means you might get hurt? Yes, actually, I do know that." Remus growled, shoving his chair back and clambering to his feet, suddenly furious. "Unlike some I could care to mention."

"Tell me, Remus, then." said Graham, suddenly quite quiet. "I spent a lot of time adjacent to the Order in the later part of the war, and I spent a long time before that keeping close tabs on it, and the muggleborns who were fighting in it, and especially the ones in our age-group. How many of those who joined your order – and I count twelve, at least – do you think survived to see the end of the war?"

"Well, there's Delia, obviously." the younger man said, dismissively. "and Joe Wight's gone back to working on his broom designs, and – and –"

Graham smiled, bitterly, as a glimmer of doubt registered on Remus' face.

"Yeah. I thought so." he said. "Not Benjy Fenwick, then, who left about a thumb and a few organs behind to identify him with, or Marlene Mckinnon, or Fergus Young, or Charles Ellis, and I could go on, as I'm sure you know. I don't think you understand this, Remus, though I know you're closer to the understanding than the others because you're a werewolf. But we're disposable to this world we live in, we muggleborns. When the Death Eaters found one of you lot, they tortured you, sure, or put you under the Imperius curse, or imprisoned you, or whatever. That's why it was such a surprise when they killed the Boneses, remember? I mean, You-Know-Who, killing a pureblood family? But us muggleborns? We're basically nothing, even to Dumbledore, or he wouldn't have thrown us at seasoned terrorists who delighted in murdering them."

"That's not what he did!" Remus bit out, furiously. "He wanted to save them – to save you –"

"Well, he didn't want it enough to give a crap about saving their actual lives, did he?" Graham shouted, enforced calm forgotten. "You're right that Dumbledore was a general. But he didn't see us all as worth the same, did he? It wasn't James and Sirius, pureblood heirs extraordinaire, who he sent on the suicide mission that infiltrating the Death Eaters was, was it? It was Charles and Philip, two sweet kids who were head over heels in love, brilliant wizards in the making, and then flat out murdered because of their filthy blood. Dumbledore might well have been a general, but he knew exactly which soldiers he did and didn't care about. There were twenty-eight muggleborns in my year, the year above, and your year – and I count eighteen of them dead, and another two missing, as of today. How does that statistic compare to the rest of your oh-so-brave fighters for the cause?"

There was a long, fragile moment, as they glared at each other, before Remus sighed, averting his eyes.

"Eight out of twenty-eight?" he asked, quietly. "You're – all that's left?"

"Why do you think I've pivoted my life onto this crazy, stupid path I've enticed you to join me on?" Graham responded, heavily. "You can trace a pattern back through all these events, if you want, and you'll find that there's some kind of a muggleborn slaughter every hundred years, or whatever period. We're the chaff that gets thrown away every time the wizarding world has an ideological upset, and for what it's worth, I bet that you're part of that same category as well. And if changing that's all I ever get done, it'd be enough."

"I still think you're wrong to talk about Dumbledore the way that you are," Remus said, carefully, "but – I do take your point, and I'd managed to forget how devastating the war was to muggleborns given how bad it ended up being for me and mine. I'm sorry about insinuating what I did about you, too – that wasn't fair of me."

"It's alright – these are emotional topics, and they're sore for both of us, Remus." Graham said, wearily. "Shall we get back to work?"

The afternoon passed a little more tensely than the morning had, though the argument passed into the back of both men's minds a little more easily when there were the practical considerations of house-building to consider.

However, as he wove the roof back together, repaired tiles mingling with newly conjured ones, Graham felt a little bad for having raised the topic with Remus at all. He knew from his many conversations with the other man that the other man felt his ability to live as a wizard was owed entirely to Dumbledore, and that was probably true enough. Even so, it didn't change anything which Graham felt about the older wizard, who in Graham's eyes had done his level best to entice his younger charges into a war he knew full well they had only a minimal chance of surviving. It hurt to feel that your best defender in the magical world still, in some way, saw people like you as disposable.

In any case, by the end of the day, Graham and Remus were able to look at their accomplishments: a charming, freshly-painted farmhouse in a verdant clearing, only a complete rewiring and plumbing away from full muggle readiness. Graham had done his level best with the piping, but he suspected it was the kind of thing best left to experts (or, if he was being honest with himself, with people who knew anything at all about pipes).

"I still can't believe that this is worth as much as you say it is, just from a bit of maintenance" Remus murmured, staring up at the building.

"It'd be more, if we knew how electricity worked," Graham remarked, idly vanishing the piles of detritus which had accumulated over the day's work as he spoke. "I reckon if we spend another few hours on the garden tomorrow, we can leave this place for a few weeks so that it won't be suspicious for us to have managed the do-up, and stick it back on the market. Shouldn't be an issue."

"Well, I'll leave the repelling ward up for now, then." Remus said. "Do you fancy a drink at Sirius'? I bet you'd like to hear exactly how enjoyable he's been finding parenthood."

"I'm always up for hearing a few embarrassing anecdotes!" Graham readily agreed. He sensed, rightly, that both of them were looking for a way to avoid the awkward impasse they'd reached earlier that day, and an enforced change of subject could do them both a power of good. "After you?"

Remus shrugged, and disapparated away, leaving Graham alone in the twilight of the clearing to gaze around one more time.

"All this – it's all going to work," he whispered, "because it has to work. I won't let it fail – I promise."

He wasn't sure who he was making the promise to – perhaps to the new generation of wizards he was creating, to the muggleborns who'd lost their lives for the cause, or just to himself. But it firmed his resolve either way, and, with a deep breath and a quiet pop of displaced air, he was gone.

AN: Thank you, again, for reading! This is a slightly longer chapter than the last, which is a good thing, though it did rather get away from me, hence the slightly erratic pacing! I'm very excited to be closing on a hundred reviews, so thanks to all who've given your appreciated – and, as always, much solicited – feedback. I'm terribly grateful.

As a side note, I noticed a few people complaining that I hadn't adequately explained how the whole 'banking' concept was meant to work, so I did include a reprised explanation in this chapter. I think it's a bit of a cop-out, but the reason for this is that I decided that chasing wizards for samples wasn't really what I wanted from writing this!

All best to you all, and thanks again.