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The summer before Susan Bones's sixth year at Hogwarts, Tom Riddle, called Voldemort, fought and killed Susan’s Aunt Amelia in her Ministry office.
For the entire school year, Susie would hear whispers cut off as she entered a room. People would tell her, reassuringly, like it made something better, that they’d heard her aunt had given a hell of a fight.
They’d heard. Susie knew. She knew her aunt’s best dueling tricks and favorite curses, her stiff lip and stubborn rage. She knew that her aunt had not died easy. Susie woke, clenching her sheets and clenching her jaw around gasps, from dreams of her aunt, a high pitched voice, a green light— her aunt’s neat, blocky office, her carefully blunt robes askew, the whites of her eyes —that hell of a fight.
She had not died peaceful, and Amelia had built her life building the foundations for peace to stand on. Susie wrapped herself in blankets, tighter, tighter, until she could fight her own way back to sleep.
Hannah’s bed was empty, on the other side of the girl’s dormitory. Her father had pulled her out of school when her mother was killed. Susan wrote her letters, because the other students only wanted to tell her how cool it was, to be related to a famous dead person.
She empathized, for the first time in her life, with Harry Potter. She lived through the school year. She managed not to snap back at well-wishers, or not too often, at least.
Her first night in the Hufflepuff dorms, age eleven, Susan Bones had laid on her back, fully-clothed on top of her bedding, and tried to map the fissures and blemishes of her ceiling, the folds of hanging cloth. She had inhaled the bright warmth of the space, tried to memorize it and find a place to fit.
When she was small, Susie’s aunt Amelia had taken her to work whenever her parents asked her to babysit. She toddled around her office. When Susie was older, and could be quiet for longer stretches than twenty minutes, she got to sit under her aunt's desk in court and listen to her give out rulings, counseling, verdicts, decrees.
There was tradition there, scripts and structure, and Susie had felt herself lean into them, comforted, strengthened. Over the years, she saw so many ways the system could be corrupted. Umbridge used it like a blunt weapon and blood purists had snuck into it for years like burrowing termites, undermining the foundations, making it their own home.
When Susan Bones was twenty-three she would look across her steaming mug and the Ministry breakroom table, and see Hermione aching to burn it all down to ashes. Susan wanted to scour it to its roots, instead, wear it down to its rebar and concrete, and then rebuild from the old, worn foundations on up.
“Your parents died for you,” Susie told Harry Potter once, glaring at a bit of legal jargon and not at him. “My aunt died for this. Now either shut up and get me a fresh cup of coffee or try to drag me out of here before I finish this.”
But that was a war away. That was a childhood away from now.
Susie was dreaming of blue bells in a storm when her father woke her in her childhood bedroom in the middle of a still night. They’d passed the edict three days before that Hogwarts attendance the next year, Susie's seventh, was mandatory. Susie was a pureblood, but she was also a Bones. There was some Death Eater flunky sitting in the office her aunt had lived and died in.
Susie’s parents had been sharing shadowed looks for weeks. Mr. Bones passed her a heavy backpack. “Quiet now, baby,” he said. “Time to get up.”
“Are we running?” she asked.
Susan’s father tried to get her mother to stay behind. “You’re a pureblood, and a Prewett,” he said. “You don’t have to run.”
“I’m a Bones,” she said, sniffing haughtily, smiling at him.
They spent three weeks at a second cousin’s, before the Ministry searches and the snatchers got really bad. Susie stretched out on the couch, trying to adjust to it, the lumps of the cushion, the way the light fell through the east-facing window. She curled up under knitted blankets, her parents snoring together a hallway away, and didn’t yet know that this was a luxury.
They stayed on ratty couches or fine ones, in attics and garden sheds. Curled up under a work bench heavy with tools and ceramic pots, Susie tore her eyes away from memorizing the pattern of rakes against the wall and focused on the leaning lines of her parents. “Did I ever tell you about the time one of the first-years pranked Ernie?”
“Which one is Ernie?” asked her father, so Susie told them—Ernie’s clipboard and his earnest truths, his weakness for gossip and his and Hannah’s shared crush on Cedric Diggory.
When they ran out of safe couches, they bought a magical tent—two rooms, lumpy beds, picked up at a second hand shop. They used it until the snatchers began using charms to search for that type of magical signature. Neither of her parents had Hermione Granger’s gifts for concealing charms, though they did their best.
Susan learned what it was to be hungry, something gnawing at her gut, and not knowing when she would fill it.
Her stomach stopped being a question after the first few months and became something to rely on, that hollowness, that edge to her thoughts. For the rest of her life, a full stomach would make her feel like she wasn’t paying attention. Years later, feeling lost, she’d have nothing for lunch but a handful of raisins, nothing for breakfast but half a stale pumpkin pasty, and feel found. She’d lock her door, then, and cry without wetting her paperwork, because being full and being safe meant she did not feel like she belonged in her body. She would run her fingers over scar tissue she didn’t have yet, not at eighteen, not sleeping in a garden shed somewhere outside of Bristol, dreaming of feasts in the Great Hall.
They dropped into sympathizer’s homes for eggs and bacon until that became to dangerous, friendly old couples left arrested in their wake. They worked at odd jobs, until every job asked for papers. They went further afield then, until the country was swarming with snatchers and even the farthest backwoodsman wouldn’t avoid the consequences. They went back to the cities, then, the little towns. The first night that they dug through a dumpster to find something to eat, Susie’s father cried.
For three bone chilling nights, after getting separated from her parents while evading some snatchers who surprised them as they ate pumpkin pasties around a blue bottle flame, Susan slept in ditches and, once, a tree. She sparked her wand in shaky imitations of her mother’s wards. She chewed through the whole pack of gum she’d found in her pocket, because it was the closest thing she had to food.
When her parents found her again she hugged them tight. As they hiked to their next tentatively safe hollow, she had her mother take out her wand and show her the movement of her ward spells, slowly. That night, the next, the next, Susie flicked her wand in careful imitation, let the muscle memory take hold.
She got up in the predawn gloom, her parents still snoring away, and dumped out the backpack she’d left with her parents when she’d gotten separated. She sorted through it, the things her father had haphazardly packed months ago, the trash and knickknacks she had picked up since. She Transfigured the trash to pebbles and tossed them into the woods. She repacked the rest with careful diligence—knife, spare clothes, jerky, bottle for water—
The next time Susie got separated from her parents, she got safely away from the snatchers and then headed to the nearest small town. She set up her wards in an empty lot and chewed a power bar while she pulled her sleeping bag out of her backpack.
She started wearing her backpack every moment. She curled around it at night, and otherwise didn't let it touch the ground.
War came to the halls of Hogwarts. War had already lived in the halls of Hogwarts for a year. It lived in the ways the students scurried, the way half of them leaped, stammered, hyperventilated at loud noises, the way the other half didn’t even twitch.
When the Bones arrived at Hogwarts, as reinforcements, students and teachers waved them through the guard lines. They told Susan she could put her backpack in the Room of Requirement and Susie stared. The DA coin around her neck, which had shone and chimed them into awakeness the previous midnight, had gone silent again. It hung heavy on her chest as she stared up at Hogwarts' walls and tried to remember each crack in the stone.
There was a shout when she stepped into the Great Hall. It had empty, waiting sickbeds instead of the great tables and her Hufflepuff cohort swarmed up the aisle to cluster around her, hug her, shake her parents' hands. They ran her through the castle, telling tales, and laying out battle plans, gesturing at Ernie's clipboard. Susie found familiar cracks in the walls, but this was not her Hogwarts.
An empty niche where Susie had once kissed a Ravenclaw was now a potential ambush. The walk from Susie’s favorite sunlit window for studying was a count of scarred walls and burnt memories that Susie would read in the twitch of her friends’ shoudlers when they crept past. The Great Hall was measured in the number of injured that could be laid out, stocks of conjured supplies, the number of bodies that would be laid out side by side.
They had spent six years living in the same warm subfloor, Susan Bones and Hannah Abbot, Ernie Macmillan and Justin Finch-Fletchley. They had measured each of their heights against each other, from eleven to seventeen, and here they met on the edge of battle carrying things in their hands that they didn't recognize in each other.
Susie could not put down her backpack. Hannah kept peace hidden up her sleeves. Ernie’s straightlaced twitches had turned to quick glances to the corners of every room he entered, to having an exact count of each of his and Hannah’s first years, and thrice daily check ins.
He and Hannah still wore their prefect's badges on their chests, had even in hiding, but while some of their first-years had yellow on their robes, others had red, blue, green. They slipped into the Room of Requirement, or to Ernie’s little office in the kitchens. “Breathing,” a Ravenclaw would offer, and slip out, limping in an accustomed manner. “Peachy keen,” a boy in red would peep, a girl in green would smile, and Ernie would take them aside with hot chocolate and a businesslike ear to talk to, a warm shoulder to cry on.
Justin Finch-Fletchley, a bit too tall, a bit too broad, had always played a bit of the harmless doofus. Better they laugh with than at you. He was no longer playing. This was armor, now, to be the biggest sheep in the herd. He bore the scars of a dozen curses he had blundered into. A dozen fist-years did not bear those scars, which had been meant for them.
The Carrows, whose attention had grown so toxic that Neville, Ginny, Luna, Ernie, Hannah—all the generals, all the lieutenants—had been driven into hiding, let Justin walk the halls. They tripped him, or used him for target practice. They laughed and he chuckled, a beat off, like he didn’t get the joke but wanted to be one of the gang, and then he left blood-boiling hexes in their desk chairs.
“Longbottom,” they hissed, when Alecto was put in the infirmary for three days.
“Ginevra, that demon,” they spat, when Snape almost lost both a hand and a kidney in one well placed hex. Justin’s grandmama had taught him that one.
“Lovegood,” they whispered when shrieking, bloody-taloned birds chased them for a whole night before they managed to icinerate all of the ugly things.
Justin Finch-Fletchley walked the halls, seeming a little bit absent to anyone looking, seeming bulky, seeming harmless. There was yellow on the hems of his robes and, after all, no wolves ever lived among the sheep.
Susie was stationed on the west side of the castle. Fifteen minutes in, a Ravenclaw sixth year she didn't know went down, bleeding from the head. When Susie turned to him, a curse caught her in the shoulder. She dragged the sixth year up with the other arm, and a curse tore through her shielding spells and caught her in the thigh. Someone dragged the both of them back to the Great Hall, but Susie never was sure who.
Someone in the Hall healed her up enough that she could demand a sling and then limp herself around on her good leg. She gave McGonagall her report on the front she'd come from. She hauled bandages and limped messages from healer to generals to the folks who were on the Floo to Hogsmeade. She gathered reports from the recently wounded, the healers dodging irritatedly around her. Concerned or doubtful people opened their mouths around a complaint about her injuries, but Susie knew where every soul was in that room, so even limping her messages moved quickly.
Voldemort asked them to give up Harry. Harry gave his own self up. He died, and then he didn't, but Susie missed that part, out in the courtyard. She was ladling water for the injured and keep an eye on the doors. If Voldemort's forces moved to take the Hall itself, she was ready. She had her wand. She had her backpack. She was her aunt's legacy and she would not die easy. This would be one hell of a fight.
It was anyway. The only combat Susie saw was those fifteen minutes. (The only combat Susie saw was nine months of running for her life, a night of watching people die in that Great Hall, and nightmares for the rest).
But Susie's left arm screamed at her. Her right leg ached, deep in the bone, like it had been blackened through. There were wounded laid out on the floor, children she had screamed with at Quidditch games, sat beside in OWLs, children who she had taught how to tickle the stained glass fruit in order to sneak into the kitchens. There were teachers, staff, and all Susie could think was that none of these were her parents' faces, which meant that they were fine, right, or just bleeding out somewhere on the grounds.
Both her parents survived the night. Ernie, Hannah, and Justin did. The curse in Susie's leg had gone too deep and too hateful to heal. It would ache and rage for the rest of her life. Her arm, which turned out slightly better, would twinge at loud noises, and only scream on particularly dark nights.
The war ended. They went home. That's the way these stories end, isn't it? Victoriously.
Susan, who had been a member of the DA but had not attended the Dark Year at Hogwarts, was ceremoniously offered the same Auror fast-track deal offered to the others. She turned it down and took a vaguely paid internship in the Department of Law Enforcement, which her aunt had once been Director of.
She thought about changing her name. She didn't bring it up to her parents, because her mother would bluster and her father would frown. Bones was an old name, one that mattered. So many people had bled for wearing it. Her parents might think she was afraid.
Susie told Hannah, though, curled up in a back booth of the Leaky on one of Hannah's breaks. Hannah said, "Afraid they'll offer you an office like Potter's?"
"That, and then not give me any work. I'm afraid they'll think I'm there for the name, the history, not because this still matters."
"You had to pick Law to go into, didn't you? Couldn't choose Auror work or Transportation."
"I--"
"No, I remember you in disagreements in the Puff Common Room-- taking notes and testimonials, calling a jury of our peers." Susie blushed hard and Hannah grinned, said, "You couldn't have ended up anywhere else. Keep the name, though. It's yours."
"I want to earn this, Hannah. I don't want it handed to me."
"As though you would let them hand you anything," said Hannah and pushed her a cold mug of butterbeer.
“I showed up late and got benched early,” Susie said. “And unearned promotions are not why I showed up.”
“I wasn't suggesting they were.”
Harry hadn’t let them give him an office bigger than a broom closet, and he’d fought against even that. They’d muttered about appearances and the Chosen One until the kid looked ready to bite someone’s head off. Ron and Hermione talked him down in that odd way they had, nudges and twitches learned over seven years of shared near death experiences.
Hermione Granger did not turn down her office—it was smaller than the one they’d offered Harry, but larger than the one he’d accepted. The Ministry fellows seemed to think it was because she was distracted—that any place she could have put down her paperwork she would have slid into as easily as this, a few quills tucked in her unruly hair.
But Hermione’s eyes were sharp as always, tired and clever, weighing injustices. She rounded up the DA members who hadn’t had her publicity, took them from their little cubicles and wobbly desks and cycled them through the comfy chairs and functional Floo of her office. She spent a lot of her time relocated to the dark little corners where Legal interns like Susie got kept while she let Parvati or Ernie use her desk and run their meetings some place that wasn’t the lower level break room with its weird smell.
Susie moved back in to her little room at her parents' house. Sitting on the porch with her mother one evening, Susie said, “I thought, when we got home, it would all—“ Susie bit off her words, offended at the way they had been beginning to crack around the edges.
The lilac bush tapped at the kitchen window on blustery mornings and Susie spilled her warm chamomile all over the kitchen table. She went for a towel and her mind screamed about snatchers, about retreat, about why the hell wasn’t she wearing her backpack—
Her favorite place to sit and read, up in a big window on the attic floor, she couldn’t get to anymore. She sat halfway up the stairs one Sunday afternoon, her leg cramping, and cried for a lot of reasons. One of them was pain.
Susie woke, jerkily, in the middle of the night. The cracks in her ceiling were jarring instead of comforting to her waking brain. They seemed like they were slightly off, moved. She was seeing ghosts in them—the brocade folds of her Hogwarts four poster, the ceilings of a dozen safe houses, a hundred night skies glimpsed through branches, listening for snatcher footfalls. She felt too big and too small at once. She was tracing into those ceiling cracks Justin’s best doodles, Hannah’s laugh lines, the lines in the palm of the first person she ever held hands with, the palm lines of the first person she ever saw die, a sixth-year Gryffindor whose hands she had clutched so tight on that Great Hall stone.
She wondered how her parents did it, and then she realized--
This was not the first war or the first loss her parents had suffered. This was not the first time they had come home and found their home no longer fit over their shaking hands, their lumps of scar tissue.
Her mother went out into the garden with her wand and her trowel. She dug up tired old bushes and laid out new soil.
Her father sang while he cooked breakfast and hugged her mother for too long when she came in smelling of fresh grass trimmings.
Susie took the elevator these days. Her leg tended to give out partway up the stairs and she had places she needed to be on time. Some days it felt like cheating. Some days she raged.
Susie went up in the elevator, clutching papers to her chest, up high to places an associate (she'd gotten promoted after three months, just a tad) was barely allowed to breathe in. She made her deliveries, got her signatures, and moved back toward the elevator doors.
Susie the associate was barely tolerated up here, but once Amelia Bones's little niece had gotten dragged here every time her parents needed a night out and asked Amelia to babysit. She'd pounded Auntie Amelia's ceremonial little gavel on the carpeting. Her aunt had told her stories about crimes and criminals, investigations and evidence, about justice.
Susie's feet stammered to a stop in front of Amelia Bones's old office.
Her aunt had lived there, almost. Almost all her important moments were tied up in those square feet of grey blue carpet, something her father had used to say about his sister, tutt disapprovingly, and sigh. Her aunt had fought there with coworkers and ministers, with friends who thought twenty eight hours days were Too Long, and with Voldemort. Amelia Bones had died there.
That was the only tragedy. Her life had been pointed, narrow, focused. It had been sharp-- it had cut to the core of everything Amelia wanted to do. Susie listened sometimes to her father regret things for his sister--all the things Amelia never did, all the time off she never took, the birthdays she had missed.
But Susie had seen her aunt's eyes light up when she had pounded that gavel, age six and giggling. She had watched her aunt in court, that straight spine, that precision, that fairness measured out in even hands. It had not been the life her father had chosen, but her aunt had spent hers building something. Susie refused to mourn anything about her but her death.
Susie climbed the ranks exactly the way she didn't climb stairs anymore. She found the last detail to close cases, took careful notes and turned her reports in early. She stayed up late, in her tiny desk or in her bedroom at home, head bowed under the cracked ceiling as she read and reread lines of law and policy. She pressed them into her head the way she had once taught her wrists and fingers to draw ward circles.
After her third promotion, one of her coworkers smirked and told her, "You should've been in Slytherin." She didn't pour her drink in his lap, but only because it was against policy.
Hard work. Fairness. Dedication. These were the tenets of her House. She would drag herself, step by honest step, up this government or she would die trying. And Susan Bones would not die easy.
Susie had a series of black and grey robes to throw on each morning. She tried to be clean, but not much more than that. If she came to a morning meeting with her hair still in the same braid she’d had when she waved goodnight to her coworkers, it was because she had never gone home—but she‘d probably found the minor statute that they needed to wave in the court’s face at their eleven o’ clock trial.
She was here for the work, because this was the basis for everything: fair trial. Laws that were written down, and known, and kept. Everyone had the same chance—and she knew that wasn’t true. The system was broken. Even without Voldemort, this system was corrupted and cracked. Sending people to Azkaban without trial. Sending people like Umbrage to rule over children, and letting a young boy anywhere near a family like the Dursleys, even on the word of the wisest wizard alive—or perhaps especially on his word.
Sometimes she called on Harry’s cultural and political clout, or Hermione’s sharply useful connections. She had her father’s name, her aunt’s name to tout out when she needed it, but mostly Susie walked straight up to obstacles and hit them with legal texts. There was something satisfying in that.
Justin Finch-Fletchley signed up for the Aurors with Potter, Weasley, and Patil. He crossed Susie’s path as he hadn’t since they’d shared a dormitory. His reports were concise and useful in court. The things he bothered to observe and remember had turned the fates of two cases before Susie, a sub department assistant now, showed up at his basement Auror’s desk and offered him a job.
"Our dead weren’t braver than we were," Hannah told her once, after conning her to help with dishes in the back of the Leaky Cauldron. "We weren’t better than they were, for surviving. Living through something like this—it’s luck as much as anything. The thing we got to choose was to fight in the first place. And we chose, Susie, you and me, Fred and Lavender and Colin, all of us. I’m so proud of them."
"So am I," Susie said, shakily, hiding her hands under the soapsuds.
"I am proud of them," said Hannah, "and I am proud of me, and I am proud of you."
Susie ended up falling asleep on the little couch in Hannah's apartment above the Leaky Cauldron. When she woke up in the morning, light spilling into the room, she looked up at the ceiling and realized that she did not know the cracks and fissures of this space.
She knew all the patterns of her aches, though, of the things Hannah would jump at, the things Justin wouldn't flinch to, and maybe those cracks were enough.
This was not about victory. This wasn't about fifteen minutes of battle or nine months of flight and fear, or all of Ernie's careful clipboards. That’s not the measure of a person.
Going through a war, or a life, without a mark, a scar, a wound, a loss—there’s not a one of us that came out of this clean. This meant she fought.
You have to make things your own, laying out new earth or filling your too-small kitchen with song. You have to live in your skin. It’s worth living in.
Susie learned the lines of scar tissue on her arm, like cracks in a ceiling, like the specific pattern of fissures and gouges that made a place its own. She traced her fingers over the raised scars while she studied obscure legal texts in her first little office, and felt like she was flicking her wand, casting ward circles, like she was circling this and claiming this, calling it her own.
She had both her feet planted firmly on the ground. One of them ached, but she shifted her stance, stayed solid, bought herself a cane for Christmas and let Justin decorate it. Where else would you put yourself if you wanted to move the world? You needed a place to start from before you started shouldering mountains around.
Hannah and Ernie called up with gossip. Justin slipped out of the office, looking harmless, and slipped back in with his hands full of secrets, his sharpest smile just for her. She had weekly chess games with Ron, who had left the Ministry but who kept a chessmaster's ear on the heartbeat of local politics.
Over a lunch that was half friendly and half conspiratorial, Hermione had wryly suggested she call it an army, but Susie had had enough of those. They were first and foremost mountain movers. They were digging up the good stone and setting down strong foundations, raising vaulting ceilings, building things that would last.
Ten years after the end of the Second Wizarding War, there was a Bones once again at the head of Magical Law Enforcement. The miniature gavel Director Susan Bones kept on her desk top was dented slightly, like it had been dropped, or like someone had once given it to a six year old and let them play.