Chapter Text
Their first night in 1995 was spent in that same old tent in the Forest of Dean. Teddy thought the whole thing was grand, having never been camping before. There were so many things he’d never seen or smelled, so many trees to climb and there was even a stream to splash in, and as long as he stayed within the ward line, none of the adults would freak out.
Harry and Hermione, in the manner of two people who had done this every other night for nearly six months, had the tent and wards up in less than ten minutes, repelling everything from muggles to wolves to insects. In another five, Harry had started on making dinner while Hermione started taking stock of all their supplies. Food wouldn’t be an issue for months, as she and Harry both carried more than enough on them at all times, so she started in on cleaning the sheets.
There were four beds, but Teddy tended to end up in Harry’s anyway, and there was a decent chance that she would as well, given the memories flooding back to her of all those freezing nights spent in this Forest as teenagers, so even if he didn’t, it probably wouldn’t be a problem. After taking inventory of the food, she went about charming the beds—unused for years now—clean.
“Both of you pick one each,” she told Draco and Parvati absentmindedly as she strode toward the opening of the tent. “Not the one by the door, or Harry might stumble into bed with you in the middle of the night.”
Draco and Parvati stared at each other for a moment, suddenly realizing that there was a very real chance that they’d never actually spoken to one another until the day before.
Parvati shot a color charm at the duvet on the bed furthest from the door, leaving it a nice shade of purple, then followed Hermione outside.
The sight that greeted her had her eyebrows shooting toward her hairline.
In the short time Hermione had been outside, she had managed to conjure several very large canvas tarps on the forest floor and had begun dumping out the contents of a small beaded bag that appeared to carry everything she had ever owned.
“What is she doing?” Draco, who had followed her out, asked Harry.
“Organizing.” Harry said. “She usually does it about once a year, but since we have the space, I suppose she’s decided to do a quick inventory. Last night she mentioned enchanting a separate bag for her books, so I imagine that will be happening as well. Probably wants to quarantine and ward off the dark magic ones as well, which will probably be a bit of a chore, given that she’s got the entire Black Library in there and most of the Potter one.”
“Dark magic?” Parvati asked incredulously. “Hermione?”
Harry shrugged. “Did you think those artifacts we had to hunt down seventh year were daisies? No, they were objects so dark that they could only be destroyed with Fiendfyre or Basilisk venom. One of them was what possessed Ginny Weasley during second year and went around petrifying people.”
Draco seemed to have an idea what Harry was talking about. “How many?” He asked, eyes wide.
“Seven.”
“Seven what?” Asked Parvati, not sure she wanted an answer.
“Seven shards of the Dark Wanker’s soul.” Harry told her evenly. Then he conjured a three armchairs and sat down. “This has got to stew for a bit, so why don’t you sit down and I’ll tell you what all we got up to seventh year, because it’s looking like we’ll have to do it all over again.”
Hermione was in the zone. Sorting was, if not her favorite thing to do, at least one of the most satisfying.
First, she got all the bigger items out of the way; a couple of couches and chairs, a few beds, a large bean bag, a piano covered in blankets layered in cushioning and humidity control charms, several other instruments in cases, an actual kitchen sink that Harry had thrown in as a joke a few years back, the trunk that held all of her potions supplies (ingredients, and preserved starter seeds and bulbs for ingredients that would not last under preservation charms, and all of her herbology equipment), a couple cat trees, several other odds and ends, like luggage, and various bags, and a large pile of pillows, blankets, and linens to be sorted through later. After all that was warded so no pests or dust or anything could get in, she started summoning all of her things out in categories onto different tarps and warding them as well, just in case she didn’t get through everything tonight.
Once her books were out on one of the tarps and warded so that Teddy couldn’t get into them while she was distracted, she began to enchant the leather belt pouch that Parvati had tossed at her as they left her flat the previous night. It wasn’t quite as small as her beaded bag, but it had a strap around the bottom that would secure it to her leg, which made her holsters feel more balanced, and took enchantments like a dream, since it was made of all natural materials. Soon enough, it was warded so that only those she allowed would be able to open it, and the now hidden pocket that held all of the darker books could only be opened with a drop of her blood and an incantation in ancient norse. The rest of the books were packed neatly into shelves, which were then enchanted to attract the books back to their places on the right shelves when they were tossed in the bag. Once all of that had been put into the now-magically-undetectably expanded pouch, she added moisture repellent, humidity control, and temperature control wards on the inside, and an imperturbable and her version of a notice-me-not charm on the outside.
The beauty of the undetectable expansion charm on the inside of the pouch was that the only magic that would be detected if anyone less than Bill Weasley at the prime of his curse-breaking career was casting diagnostics, all they would see was the imperturbable charm, which was very commonly used by anyone who had ever read a book on household charms, and a spell that looked a lot like a notice-me-not.
The difference between the original notice-me-not charm and her alteration was that, even if someone were to push past it and managed to look into the pouch or whatever it was cast on, nothing in it would strike them as particularly interesting, no matter what they saw.
She used it perhaps a bit too often, as she had a tendency towards becoming involved in things that were perhaps a bit left of legal.
(Maybe Parvati had been a bit right about the bad girl thing, in the sense that Hermione would probably be considered a criminal if she wasn’t so good at covering her tracks. She decided to put that thought aside for later.)
Books done with, she vanished the now-dusty tarp she had been using and moved onto clothes. Once they had all been summoned over to a clean tarp, she started laying out all of her clothes and casting cleaning charms. A quick conjuration of a full-length mirror and she began holding clothes up to herself and deciding if they went with the style that Parvati had helped her start to cultivate the previous day.
Parvati had brought all of the pieces that had been glamoured onto Hermione back with her when she returned from her shop, as well as several pairs of earrings and larger gold-plated claw clip that was shaped a bit like a dragon, which she had used to pull back her hair during the trip back, but other than that, she was wearing the whole outfit from the day before, which made it pretty easy to see what would go with the leather and what wouldn’t.
She mostly stuck with some of the darker or warmer colored button-up shirts and the two flannels she owned to wear over the muggle t-shirts she usually only wore at home and some of her dad’s old oversized concert t-shirts that she had stolen as pajamas when she was a teenager, which she figured would be nice in the summer. Pants-wise, she stuck with darker, high-waisted denims, which was mostly what she wore at home anyway, though she had one pair of a lighter wash that were comfortably worn from years of use that she kept with her main clothes as well. She also had a few pairs of shorts that were long enough that she was comfortable wearing them, but would definitely be scandalous to most witches.
For dressier clothes, she went with a couple of the more modern pantsuits she usually wore in court and the three dressed she already owned, and she had a few pairs of dragon-hide boots and a pair of shoes that she’d mostly worn while brewing before that looked a little dressier since they’d been used as part of her sixth-year Hogwarts uniform.
Honestly, she was surprised at how much of what she already owned went well with the new look, but maybe she shouldn’t be, given that she’d actually lived with Parvati for years. Most of it wouldn’t really be recognizable to her younger self, either, since she’d grown a couple inches and a shoe size at seventeen and needed to replace most of what she’d had, and by then she had already been planning on going on the run, so had shopped less proper and more practical for that.
Most of the clothes she wasn’t going to be using any time soon, she stowed away in a slightly size-expanded old suitcase. The ones she would be using , she went to put in the carpet bag she used to appear to be packing for work trips, until she remembered that that was where she kept her yarn stash.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed, summoning another tarp to dump all her yarn on. God, she’d forgotten just how much she had.
Was this hoarding? She was beginning to think this might be hoarding.
Once the bag was empty, she went back to putting away her clothes, making sure they were all folded neatly so she wouldn’t have to bother with wrinkles later.
It was getting a bit dark at this point, so she cast several balls of light into the air around her and went back to the next category: jewelry.
She didn’t have a lot to be honest, wasn’t really a ring girl, since she worked with her hands so much, just earrings and a few bracelets that went mostly unused. Most of the silver pieces were relegated to the smaller pouch in her little jewelry bag, but remembering the pearl dangling from her choker (which still made her blush whenever she remembered it was around her neck. Despite liking how it looked, she had still spent nearly an hour ensuring that nobody but her could cast magic on it. Along with an imperturbable charm because she liked it, okay? ), she kept a few of the pearl studs in the main pouch as well.
Makeup was next, because she didn’t really know what she had that was still good, except maybe the one eyeshadow palette that she actually used. That assumption was correct and most of it was vanished except for a black eyeliner, the white one and the lipstick that Parvati had given her, and a mascara. Lovely. Wasn’t like she really needed anything else.
She glanced at the yarn pile over her shoulder and sighed. Yarn or stationery. The stationery pile was nearly as daunting as the yarn pile, but would probably take more work, since she’d have to check that things were still working.
Rolling her eyes at herself and deciding that both could be done later as long as they were contained, she summoned a lightly expanded suitcase to fill with all the yarn—bar two of her current projects—and a trunk for the stationery, except for her (warded to high heavens) journals, one for planning and one for researching, and the pouch full of the ballpoint pens and highlighters that she generally favored, which went into the messenger bag she usually carried with the two knitting projects.
All of the bags and trunk that had been filled except for the messenger bag and the carpet bag went on the tarp with the large items, which were all then carefully levitated back into her beaded bag in order of least-to-most immediate usefulness. Then she vanished the tarps and mirror and most of the lights and made her way back to where Harry was dishing out supper.
“Feeling better, Miss Packrat?” Harry asked, looking amused.
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be throwing stones in glass houses, Harry Potter; your bag has just as much stuff in it and I organize mine more often!”
He raised his hands in surrender and handed her a bowl.
“Where’s Teddy?” She asked, after she’d taken a few bites.
Harry gestured off in the opposite direction from where she’d been sorting to find Teddy halfway up a tree.
She glanced back at Harry, who rolled his eyes. “Relax, I cast cushioning charms on the ground of nearly a hundred yard radius, he’ll be fine.”
Hermione relaxed and went back to eating.
“How did you cast for so long without breaks?” Parvati asked, already having finished her own food. “You don’t even look tired!”
Hermione swallowed her bite. “Practice. Magic’s like a muscle, and all that.”
Draco and Parvati stared at her, while Harry just nodded.
“I was always told that your core grows with you.” Draco said, glancing between them.
“It does,” Harry said. “But that’s not all there is to it, at least not from what we’ve noticed.”
“How do you mean?” Draco asked.
“It’s like…walking up and down the stairs at Hogwarts.” Harry decided on an analogy the purebloods would get. “The first few weeks it’s awful, but once you get used to it it’s not as bad anymore? That’s your muscles adjusting to how much they’re being used. Magic does the same thing. How much do you cast in a day, would you say?” He asked them.
Parvati, familiar with Harry’s teaching style even ten years later, replied honestly with, “Probably a bit less than what Hermione’s done in the last hour. With all the warding when we first got here? That was probably three or four days for me, easy, and I didn’t recognize some of the wards. Most of what I do is smaller charms work that I’ve been doing for years, and I definitely don’t usually do so much so quickly.”
Draco, following her example, said, “Probably less than that. There’s a bit of low-level strain, since I’m usually working several cauldrons at a time, brewing for St. Mungo’s, and I’ll usually get a bit of runes research in, but none of that is particularly taxing, except for the apparition to and from home.”
Harry and Hermione exchanged a look. Harry nodded to Hermione, who took over the explanation.
“The last time we were camping here, back during seventh year, when we started out, the apparition, setting up, and warding campsites every few days was exhausting.” She said bluntly. “I was useless for hours after, and couldn’t apparate on my own for days after. It took nearly a month for me to adjust to it, but by the fourth month, I could do it every day if I had to, and sometimes we did. Harry started taking some days, once he’d learned the spells, but he had a habit of overpowering everything and making it harder to take down if we had to leave at a moment’s notice, so mostly it was still me. By the end of it all, I could take everything down and put it back up a minute later half-starved, half-awake, half-frozen in my fucking underwear, and in pitch darkness. Which I had to do on three occasions because the bloody snatchers kept showing up while I was taking a sponge bath and I had the only wand, since Harry’s got broken around Christmas.”
They were staring at her again, this time open-mouthed like fish, but she decided she didn’t care and handed her bowl over to Harry, who served her another helping.
“Basically, unless other people’s magical capacity per day suddenly triples for no reason every few months, which we have no data to suggest that it does, we can only assume that it works a bit similarly to a muscle.” Harry said, in a near exact quotation of what she had said the last time they had attempted to explain their theory to someone.
(Given that that someone had been Dean Thomas, muggleborn (or, well, halfblood, apparently) football fan extraordinaire, who could cast permanent animation charms on his artwork all day and had become a bit of a gym rat in his off time; he got it with very little explanation required.)
“And from what we’ve observed: in the same way that we would lose some of that leg muscle every holiday; if we don’t keep up the same or similar level of magic cast every day, we lose the ability to do it as easily.” Hermione continued.
“How did you observe that?” Parvati asked, brow furrowed. “It must have been over at least a few months, right?”
“So you know how I have five Masteries?” Hermione asked.
“You have how many? ” Draco, who had two of his own, looked exhausted just thinking about it.
“No! I did not know that!”
“Okay,” Hermione blinked, having forgotten that this was not common knowledge. “Well, I do. DADA, Ancient Runes, Arithmancy, Transfiguration, and I just finished my Spellcrafting one a couple months ago. Anyway—“
“That is not something you can just brush off , Hermione!” Parvati barely stopped herself from yelling. “It takes most people at least three years to get a Mastery, how did you manage five in a decade?! ”
“Well,” Hermione said, glancing at Harry, who took over so they could keep eating.
“Hermione insisted we study while we were on the run, even though it was a pain, so that it would be easier for us to just test out of our NEWTs instead of having to go back to school. So we did, but the thing was, we’d also been scouring high level dark arts and defense books for months trying to find out how to destroy the horcruxes, which meant that we had quite a bit more information than most people taking their NEWTs should.
“So after our DADA tests were graded, they called us in for a meeting with Griselda Marchbanks, who’s been the head of the Department of Magical Education since Dumbledore was in school. She basically challenged us to take a look at the self-study guide for the Mastery exam, take a week to study for it, and come take it after.” Harry explained.
“And so we did.” Hermione said. “And it was probably the most difficult test I’d ever taken in my life at that point—“
“Definitely,” Harry interjected.
“—but we both passed. Which is how Harry became the youngest person to gain a Defense Against the Dark Arts Mastery in Britan’s history.”
“And Hermione became the second youngest by several years.”
“That is f-freaking crazy. Hello Teddy, did you finally get hungry after climbing all those trees.” Draco asked, looking just past Hermione.
“Yeah, they’re really tall. Are you guys talking about Aunty Mione’s Masteries?” Teddy asked, happily taking a bowl from Harry. “I know all about those.”
“Oh?” Harry asked. “I just told Draco and Parvati about Defense Against the Dark Arts, why don’t you start on Ancient Runes.”
“Did you tell them about the study guides?” Teddy asked.
“Not yet, Cub.”
Teddy began his lecture in a tone very like Hermione’s lecture tone. “After Uncle Harry and Aunty Mione took the DADA test, Aunty Mione decided that she wasn’t going to bother with apprenticeships because she had better things to waste three years on, so she marched down to Madam Marchbanks’s office and asked for all the study guides so that she could just study for whatever in her spare time.
“Madam Marchbanks wasn’t sure she believed her, but decided to let her try, so she gave her the two hardest ones: Ancient Runes and Arithmancy.” Teddy took a bite and went to continue, but pouted and finished chewing at the looks Hermione, Harry, and Draco were giving him. “So imagine her surprise when only two months later Aunty Mione schedules an appointment to take Ancient Runes.”
Draco, who had also gone through a Runes Mastery dropped his face into his hands and groaned, which didn’t deter Teddy in the least.
“And she passed! Then three months after that, she scheduled the Arithmancy test and passed that too, and was the youngest person to ever pass either of them at twenty!”Teddy did a little victory dance and would have spilled his stew if Harry hadn’t caught it. “Oh! Thanks, Da!”
Harry’s eyes practically bugged out of his skull at the name. “Welcome, Cub.” He choked out. Before he could acknowledge it any further, Teddy barreled on.
“After that, she finally gave Aunty Mione all the study guides, but told her she wasn’t allowed to take more than one a year from then on, so she wouldn’t study too hard and give herself and annerism.”
“Aneurism, Teddy-love.” Hermione corrected.
“Thanks Aunty Mione!” Teddy took another bite of his stew. “So after that, Aunty Mione scheduled her Transfiguration exam for exactly a year later in order to beat out Headmistress McGonagall by three months to be the youngest to get that one also, and beat Dumbledore by eight!”
“Then I took a few years to actually do my law apprenticeship, just for the experience, and started studying Spellcrafting in my downtime, which I continued until I finally got around to scheduling the test for a few weeks ago.” Hermione finished when Teddy got distracted by food.
“That,” Parvati said, “Is actually insane. You know all those crazy things I listed yesterday? Blown out of the water.”
“Want to make a bet?” Harry asked Draco, eyes sparkling in mischief.
“What bet?” Draco asked, wary.
“This time in three years, she has seven.”
“Absolutely not.” Draco declared. “Last time I bet against Granger, she lured Umbridge into the Forbidden Forest and nearly got her to instigate her own trampling via herd of centaurs!”
“Aunty Mione did what!?”
“So, Harry!” Parvati interrupted that line of questioning. “Got any secret Masteries to tell us about?”
Harry was very loudly silent.
“Absolutely not .” Draco said again. “There’s no way. I refuse to believe—“
“Transfiguration.” Hermione told him gleefully.
“ Merlin almighty, please tell me—“
“He just self-studied and had tea with McGonagall once a week and got it in under two years.”
“I’m going to cry!” Draco wailed dramatically, making the whole group laugh.
Hermione spent most of the rest of the night grinning into her stew as Harry and Draco set each other off.
Tomorrow, they could get into the planning, but tonight, they just rested and laughed.