Chapter Text
By nine o’clock the rain over Ashwell Terrace had settled in for the night. It hazed the streetlamps and drummed on the parked cars, and the one man out in it seemed in no hurry to get anywhere dry.
He came up the pavement slowly, hood up, cloaked to the ankle, and stopped opposite the join between number eleven and number thirteen. Number eleven had a blue door and a bicycle chained to its railings. Number thirteen had a skip full of somebody’s old kitchen. Between them ran a strip of sooty brick about four feet wide, which nobody on Ashwell Terrace ever seemed to look at twice.
From an inside pocket the man drew a scrap of parchment, creased soft as cloth from years of folding, and tilted it to the lamplight, though he mouthed the words a beat ahead of reading them.
Hermione Granger lives at Number Twelve, Ashwell Terrace, London.
He looked up. And number eleven and number thirteen drew apart — brick unfolding from brick, a drainpipe elbowing itself into place, window boxes arriving last — and between them stood a narrow slip of a building that had not existed a moment before.
A light burned in the window.
Through it he could see a kitchen and a woman at the stove with a book in one hand and her wand tucked behind her ear. A knife chopped onions by itself on the board, a spoon stirred the pot, and she read on through all of it, turning a page with her thumb. As he watched, she reached up without lifting her eyes and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, out of the wand’s way.
It was a very small thing. He stood in the rain longer than he meant to, watching her do it.
Then he crossed the road, climbed the three steps, and did not knock. He set his hand flat against the door and waited while the wards came awake and felt them go over him without hurry. Then something in them eased, and the street door opened onto a steep stair with warmth and the smell of onions coming down it to meet him.
Hermione Granger’s Thursday evening had been going unusually well.
The week was survived and the Wizengamot had adjourned for the month without doing anything irreversible. She had got out of the Ministry before seven for the first time since the new year, there was soup on, and the evening post had brought only two items: a note from her mother about August, and the new Witch Weekly, owled over annually and on purpose by its editor.
The note pinned to the cover said: Page four. Before you complain, remember that I only edit it. — Parvati.
Page four said: THE ANNUAL REGISTER — BRITAIN’S MOST ELIGIBLE. And there, at number one on the witches’ list, above a photograph from last year’s Ministry gala that she had certainly never authorised, was herself: chin lifted, mid-argument with someone outside the frame, hair escaping its pins, which the caption called untamed.
Hermione read the citation — brains and beauty in rare harmony; declined to comment, which sources describe as characteristic — and snorted into the soup.
Number one. Again. It was proof of nothing except that the magazine had finally run out of news — she was twenty-five and single and had once been photographed laughing —
She stopped turning pages.
The wizards’ list sat on page five, and at the top of it, above the words whereabouts unknown — which Witch Weekly appeared to regard as romantic — was Harry.
It was an old photograph. Years old. A boy of nineteen in Auror trainee robes, thin as a wand, glancing off to the side of the frame as though the photographer had cornered him, which the photographer almost certainly had. Every few seconds the boy in the picture pushed his glasses up his nose and looked for the exit.
The scoff she had ready went soft somewhere in her chest and never arrived.
It had been a long time since the last letter — three lines, if she was generous with the definition. She had known better than to wait for the promised proper one, and had waited anyway, and somewhere in the waiting she had stopped mentioning him at Sunday lunch because of what it did to Molly’s face. Her best friend had become a photograph that looked for exits.
She missed him the way you miss a language you’ve stopped getting to speak.
The wards chimed.
“There’s extra if you’re staying,” she called over her shoulder, going for a second bowl, “sit down, Ronald — and if this is about the Falmouth thing, I’ve told you, I regulate creatures, and I don’t care what their Seeker did, he doesn’t qualify—”
She turned round with the bowl in her hand.
A hooded figure stood dripping on her mat. Tall, cloaked in black with the hood drawn full forward, and far too still for Ron, who had never once stood quietly in a kitchen in his life — and for the space of one heartbeat every warm thing in the kitchen turned to tin, because two people in the world could pass those wards, and one of them was Ron, and this was not Ron.
The bowl hit the floor. The hex was out of her before the fear had finished arriving — a streak of red past the figure’s ear that took a divot out of her doorframe — and her wand was already coming round again as the figure’s hands went up and a voice started, “Whoa — hold—”
Her second spell was a good one. It was fast, it was on target, and it was essentially wasted. The figure’s wrist turned half an inch. Her Stunner folded up in mid-air like a letter being closed, and her wand left her hand — no flash, no shout — and crossed the room into a gloved palm.
Hermione stopped breathing.
What she had just seen was not Ministry power. It had been done to her the way she might take a knife from a toddler, and done kindly. She stood in her own kitchen, disarmed, cornered, and absolutely without options.
The intruder leaned over and laid her wand on the dresser, handle towards her.
“That’s a relief,” he said. “I’d worried peace might’ve made you soft.”
The voice reached her a full second before the meaning did. She knew it was him before he pushed the hood back.
He was broader. That was the first mad, irrelevant thing she noticed — solid through the shoulders and chest in a way the boy on page five had never been — and there was a beard, short and dark and disgracefully well-kept.
Behind the glasses, the same green as ever, doing the same thing it always did, which was to look at her as though she were the fixed point and everything else the weather. The scar was fading into an old white line. The photograph on page five was years and a whole man out of date.
She took in the beard and said nothing about it.
“Harry.”
“Hello, Hermione.”
She crossed the kitchen with no memory of having started, and hit him at approximately the speed of a Bludger. The hug took him back a full step into the doorframe — her arms round his neck, his laugh buried somewhere in her hair, both of them holding on with the whole-armed, unembarrassed ferocity they had learned in a war and never seen any reason to unlearn. He smelled of rain and of somewhere hot, and underneath it, impossibly, of himself.
She didn’t let go. She had meant to — there was a great deal of shouting queued up and waiting — but her fist had closed in the wet wool of his cloak, and she stood there another long moment with her face against his shoulder. He didn’t say anything.
Then she stepped back to arm’s length and hit him again, considerably harder, on the arm.
“Harry James Potter.”
He winced.
“A year, Harry.” Her voice was doing the thing where it climbed a register per clause. “A full year since I heard from you and even longer since I’ve seen you. You stopped answering. Your last owl said ‘proper letter to follow,’ and I believed you, and I kept writing. Nine owls, Harry. Your birthday, Christmas — nine owls, and not one line back. I didn’t know if you were hurt, or lost, or lying dead in some desert, and Kingsley wouldn’t tell me a thing—”
“I know.”
“—and then you appear in my kitchen late at night, looking like an Unspeakable—”
“I know,” he said. “Hermione. I know.”
She stopped, breathing hard, because there was something in the way he said it that left the sentence nowhere to go.
“I haven’t got an excuse,” Harry said. “I’ve had the whole flight home to invent one, and they were all rubbish. I’m sorry.”
Hermione glared at him for a long moment.
“That is a terrible apology,” she said at last. “It doesn’t even attempt mitigation.”
“It’s the true one.”
“That is why it’s terrible.” Then she stopped, and her eyes narrowed. “Did you say flight?”
“Plane. Heathrow, this afternoon.”
“You flew? Why on earth would you—”
“Because the International Portkey Office keeps records,” said Harry, “and records have a way of reaching the Prophet by dinnertime. If I’d come back the proper way, my face would be on the evening edition by now. I wanted you to know I was back before the entire country did.”
Hermione considered this, found it irritatingly sensible, and dealt with it by snatching her wand up from the dresser, jabbing it at the fallen bowl — which reassembled itself — and pointing him into a chair. “Sit down. You’re having soup, and then you’re giving me the whole story, start to finish.”
“It’s a long story.”
“Then you’ll want the bread as well.”
The soup gave them both something to do, which was a mercy.
She ladled his bowl, cut bread, and put the kettle on, and it was only when she was one sugar into the second mug that she caught her own hands at it: strong, a splash of milk, the single sugar he’d always pretended he didn’t take, assembled without her permission, by hands that remembered how he took it. She glanced up. He had noticed. Neither of them said anything, and she set the mug down in front of him a little harder than she’d meant to.
He ate like a man who had been on the move, which it emerged he had. The story arrived in pieces, between mouthfuls, in the deliberately flattened voice he had always used for the things that mattered: Berlin first — “dark-artefact containment,” he said, and left it there — then the Balkans and their hit-wizard programme, then Egypt, after which the story thinned.
“Go on, then,” said Harry, catching her looking. “Say it.”
“I have nothing whatsoever to say about the beard.”
“You’ve been not saying it since I took the hood down.”
Hermione took her time buttering a piece of bread she didn’t especially want. “It’s very tidy,” she said at last, conceding the point. “It suits you.”
It earned her a grin over the mug, and something in the evening slid into place. While she was refilling his bowl without asking, she watched him take stock of the kitchen in the old quiet sideways way, the sweep he probably didn’t know he was running: the one cloak on the hooks by the door; the one pair of boots beneath it. She watched him notice, and watched him decide not to ask, and was on both counts, grateful.
What he did instead was reach across the table and drag the Witch Weekly towards himself by one corner, like a man confiscating evidence.
“Don’t,” said Hermione.
“Page four,” Harry read, with relish. “Number one. Sources describe declining to comment as characteristic—”
“Give it here—”
“Brains and beauty in rare harmony.”
“I will hex you again, and this time I’ll aim.”
“There’s a waiting list,” said Harry, in wonder, holding the magazine out of range as she made a grab for it. “Hermione, there’s an actual — it says applicants are advised—”
She threw the tea towel at his head. He caught it without looking, laughing properly now, the first entirely unguarded sound he’d made all evening, and she sat back down feeling absurdly pleased with herself.
“It’s all rubbish, you know,” she said. “The whole feature. They decide it over lunch by owl-poll, nobody’s consulted, and it has nothing to do with anything real—”
“They’re not wrong, though,” said Harry.
“Don’t you start—”
“I’m not teasing.” And he wasn’t; the grin had settled into something plainer as he looked at the photograph and then back at her. “You look beautiful, Hermione. You always have.”
For a moment she had nothing at all to say. Her hands found the magazine and squared its corners against the edge of the table. It was a kind thing to say — the sort of thing a brother might say, home after years away, and that was obviously all it was — and she got her voice back by going on the attack.
“You’re on page five, you know. Number one wizard. Whereabouts unknown. They’ve used a photograph from 2000 — you look like you’re about to be sick on the photographer.”
“I think I actually was,” said Harry.
That earned him a look that was half exasperation and half something gentler. “Molly’s going to cry when she sees you, you do realise. She’s counted your absence out in Sundays, and she is owed north of two hundred of them. Every week, without exception — ‘that boy is wasting away in some desert, no one feeding him, look at Ron, Ron, have some more’ — she piles Ron’s plate as though it’ll reach you somehow. And she has been knitting. George claims a jumper a fortnight, against your return. There’s said to be a trunk.”
Harry had gone still.
“A trunk,” he repeated.
“You’ll come home to a new wardrobe,” said Hermione. “And you will eat everything she gives you, and ask for seconds.”
He turned the mug a slow half-circle on the table. “I didn’t think anyone was keeping count. It’s easier to go on not writing when you’ve told yourself nobody’s keeping the seat.”
“Yes, well.” Hermione stood, briskly, and took his bowl before the moment could get any bigger than it already was. “You told yourself wrong. The seat’s been kept.”
The talk wound down after that into the comfortable ebb of two people with years to cover and no hurry about it. It was Hermione who broke one of the quiet stretches, in a smaller voice than she’d used all evening.
“I’m sorry about Kreacher, by the way. I never got the chance to say it.”
“He went in his sleep,” said Harry. “Left Hogwarts one day and passed in front of the kitchen fire, with Regulus’s locket polished on the wall above him. He’d have called it dying at his post — so that’s what I call it too.” He looked at the table. “There didn’t seem much point keeping the house after that.”
“Kingsley told me you came back for the burial.” She said it gently, but she said it. “Two days, Harry. And you didn’t tell anyone you were in the country.”
Harry was quiet for a moment.
“I couldn’t have done the seeing-everyone in two days,” he said. “So I didn’t do any of it. It seemed fairer at the time.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No,” he said. “I suppose it wasn’t.”
She let it rest there — it was enough that it had finally been said — and it was almost midnight when he stood at last and reached for his cloak.
“Right,” he said. “I should probably—”
“Should what? Where exactly do you think you’re going?”
“The Leaky. Tom’ll have a room going—”
“The Leaky?” She was on her feet now. “You have a shrunken trunk and the most famous face in Britain, and your plan is to walk into a wizarding pub at midnight, the day before you’d like the Prophet not to know you’re home? Absolutely bloody not. The spare room’s made up. You’re staying here until you find somewhere and you’re having breakfast in the morning, and we’re not discussing it.”
Harry blinked. “Did you just swear?”
“I’m twenty-five, Harry, not Head Girl. There have been developments.”
He opened his mouth to answer that. She looked at him. He shut it again — and then he laughed, quietly, mostly at himself.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” said Harry. “I just missed this.”
“Missed being bossed about?”
“More than I could’ve fitted in a letter.”
Hermione turned away to hide whatever her face was doing about that. “The spare room’s made up,” she said again, firmly.
Behind her back, her wand gave a small economical flick, and down the hall the spare room hurried to make itself true, pillows fluffing and sheets straightening.
“It’s always made up,” she added.
“Is it?” said Harry with a knowing grin.
“Bathroom’s on the left. Good night, Harry.”
He paused in the doorway to the hall, one hand on the frame, and looked back at her.
“It’s good to see you,” he said. “I should’ve led with that. It was the whole reason for the trip.”
He went off down the hall before she could decide what to do with any part of that sentence. Hermione stood in her kitchen for a moment, alone with two mugs, and then washed both by hand, the Muggle way, which took longer, which was the point.
Harry woke at six to rain and the smell of ink, remembered where he was, and went through to make breakfast, on the grounds that it was the one debt he could start repaying immediately.
Hermione appeared at seven, dressed for the Ministry with her hair already coming down, and stopped in the kitchen doorway at the sight of eggs.
“Oh,” she said. “I’d forgotten you cook.”
“Somebody here has to. Yours still come out like rubber.”
“Mine come out like a hex,” said Hermione, sitting down with the Prophet, “and we both know it. There’s no shame in specialisation. I’m told I have other qualities.”
“Page four says so.”
“Eat your breakfast.”
They went in together by Floo, which was his first mistake, because it meant arriving in the Atrium at ten to eight, in full view of the morning tide. The Fountain of Magical Brethren was long gone — in its place stood a plain basin of black marble, names cut round the rim, which was better, and which he could not look at for very long. The morning tide managed a few seconds of indifference before somebody dropped a briefcase.
By the lifts, the whispering had thickened. A flock of interdepartmental memos wheeled overhead; one peeled off, circled Harry twice at a respectful distance, apparently lost its nerve, and rejoined the others.
“Breathe,” murmured Hermione, beside him. “Don’t fidget.”
“I’m not fidgeting.”
“You’ve checked the Portkey Office departures board twice.”
He had, too. It hung beside the lifts, chalk letters rearranging themselves — LISBON 8.40, REYKJAVIK 9.15, CAIRO 11.00. He stopped looking at it.
The lift took him up towards Level One with the same lack of interest it showed the tea trolley.
Kingsley Shacklebolt’s office had a fire, a view charmed to show the weather actually occurring above London — grey, at the moment, with ambitions — and, this morning, two men in it: Kingsley behind the desk, broad and unhurried, in robes that made deep purple look like a form of authority; and Gawain Robards in the visitor’s chair, grey as a battleship and holding a mug that said, in cheerful yellow letters, SALCOMBE.
“Harry,” said Kingsley. “Welcome home.”
“Minister. Head Auror.”
“Not for much longer, thank Merlin,” said Robards, with deep satisfaction. “You’ve kept fit. Good. Sit down.”
Harry sat. The chair opposite the Minister’s desk had been positioned, he noted, so that its occupant faced both men at once, which told him everything about how the next few minutes had been planned.
“I’ll spare you the throat-clearing,” said Kingsley. “Gawain retires at Christmas. He has given the Ministry thirty years, and Devon has given him a cottage, and I am given to understand the matter is not negotiable.”
“The mackerel run in June,” said Robards.
“The post of Deputy Head Auror has been vacant for several months,” Kingsley went on. “I am offering it to you, effective whenever you say yes, with the understanding that when the Head’s office empties at Christmas, you are groomed, ready, and standing in front of it.”
There was a short silence, in which the charmed window rained on London.
“Head Auror,” said Harry.
“You would be the youngest in the Office’s history,” said Kingsley, “by eleven years.”
“And you want me at a desk.”
“I want you at the desk. Eventually.”
“Right,” said Harry. He looked from one to the other of them and felt several feelings arrive together. “Can I say the impolite thing, Minister?”
“You’re going to regardless. It’s one of your qualifications.”
“You don’t need me to run the Auror Office. You’ve got a corps my own generation rebuilt, half a dozen squad leaders better at paperwork than I’ll ever be, and a crime rate a Muggle borough would frame and hang in the lobby. What you want is the name on the door. You want me behind a desk so the desk can be famous.”
Robards made a low noise into the SALCOMBE mug that in a less senior man would have been a laugh.
“That,” said Kingsley, unmoved, “is about forty per cent true.” He drew a sheet of parchment an inch towards himself and left it there. “The rest, then, since you’ve asked for impoliteness. The Office you left doesn’t exist. The purge took a third of the senior ranks — some for what they did that year, some for what they signed, some for what they managed not to notice — and the gap was filled by an emergency intake nobody had time to train, because the war hadn’t left any. That was meant to be a stopgap. It is now the culture. I have a corps that catches dark wizards extremely well, and it has not once in seven years been asked what else an Auror Office is for.”
“It works,” said Robards. “That’s the trouble with it. Everything wrong with it works.”
“You are the finest field operator this Office has produced in decades,” said Kingsley, “and you have spent years learning what six other services know that we don’t, and the longer we leave you out there, the more of it stays there.” Something passed between him and Robards then — brief, practised, entirely closed. “I am not asking you to stop being good at your job, Harry. I am asking you to take your skills and commit them here.”
The word commit sat in the room slightly longer than Kingsley had probably intended it to.
“I’ll think about it,” said Harry, at last.
“But not today?”
“I just got back yesterday evening. Give me at least a couple of weeks before I decide the rest of my life.”
Kingsley studied him for a moment, and then inclined his head. Harry stood up to leave.
“A fortnight. Britain has kept this long; it will keep two weeks more.” As Harry reached the door, he added, “For what it’s worth — the country’s glad to have you back. But I find the country’s opinion moves you roughly not at all, so I’ll say instead that I am. Go and see Weasley. He’s on Level Seven, and if he learns from the Prophet that you were in the building, no power of mine can protect you.”
Level Seven smelled of broom polish and old programmes, and the corridor to the Department of Magical Games and Sports was lined with photographs of teams who waved at Harry with varying degrees of recognition. From behind the third door on the left came a voice he’d have known at the bottom of a lake, raised in the special patience of a man repeating himself.
“—no, because you can’t schedule the Falmouth fixture for the equinox, Demelza, because the last time the Falcons played on the equinox their Seeker bit someone, it’s in the file —”
Harry pushed the door open.
Ron Weasley stood behind a desk deep in fixture charts, a quill behind each ear, jabbing his wand at a scale model of a stadium that kept rearranging its own stands. A Howler smoked sullenly in a wire tray marked PORTUGAL. He was broader than Harry remembered, and taller than most doorways, and there was ink on his cuff and freckles all the way to his hairline, and when he looked up his face went through surprise and arrived at something that made Harry’s chest hurt.
“Bloody hell,” said Ron.
“Hey, mate.”
“Demelza,” said Ron, to the door across the corridor, without taking his eyes off Harry, “cancel the equinox thing. Cancel — actually, cancel everything. War hero in my office.”
Then he came round the desk and hugged Harry with both arms, thumping him twice on the back hard enough to loosen fillings, and stood back, holding him by the shoulders, looking him over the way only three people alive were allowed to.
“You get taller?” Ron accused.
“Still shorter than you.”
“Everyone is. It’s a burden.” He gestured at the lower half of Harry’s face with genuine scientific interest. “And what is that?”
“Egypt.”
“Egypt gave you a beard?”
“There wasn’t a lot to do in the evenings.”
“Mum’s going to have opinions. She’s going to have opinions in courses.” Ron cleared a stack of fixture charts off a chair with one sweep, pointed Harry into it, and dropped back into his own, grinning so widely it looked structural. “You’ve seen Hermione? You must’ve—”
“Stayed at hers last night. Hexed me on arrival.”
“Course she did. Standards,” said Ron warmly. “Did she do the thing where she’s shouting at you and feeding you at the same time?”
“Both at once. Soup and a scolding.”
“That’s the full welcome, that is. You’re forgiven, mostly.” He put his feet up on a crate stencilled CHUDLEY CANNONS — SURPLUS. “Don’t ask. They’re still shite, before you do. Some things hold steady.” He beamed. “Deputy Head, is it? Don’t gape, mate, it’s the worst-kept secret in the whole bloody building. Robards has been describing the mackerel to anyone who stands still. Kingsley put the fear on you yet?”
“He gave me a fortnight.”
“That’s the fear. He does it with patience now, it’s much worse.” Ron shook his head admiringly.
“That why you left?” Harry asked. He asked it easily, but he’d been carrying the question a long time. “The Aurors, I mean.”
Ron considered him for a second, and answered the real question, because he had always been better at hearing those than anyone gave him credit for.
“Turns out I don’t love hunting people,” he said, simply. “Loved the bit where we won. Loved working with you. But you’d have kept at it forever, mate, you’re built for it — and I kept waking up dreading the roster. Then Fred and George needed a pair of hands for the Hogsmeade shop, and that was brilliant for a year, and then this came up, and—” he waved a hand at the fixture charts, the sulking model, the smoking Howler, the whole glorious mess of it — “turns out the chess brain’s got a use after all. Nobody in this department could schedule for shite. I can. I did the entire Quidditch league calendar in a weekend and they looked at me like I’d cured bloody dragon pox.”
“You love it,” said Harry.
“I really do,” said Ron, happily. “Right, you’re coming out Saturday, that’s settled, pint at the — actually not the Leaky, you’ll get mobbed — there’s a place in the village does a—”
“You and Hermione should both come,” said Harry. “Surprised I didn’t see you last night—”
He stopped, because something had crossed Ron’s face.
“She didn’t tell you,” said Ron.
“Tell me what?”
“Blimey.” Ron rubbed the back of his neck, and then — being Ron — simply said it. “We ended it, mate. Me and Hermione. Years back — not long after you left, if I’m honest.” He watched Harry absorb it. “It’s fine. That’s the bit to hold on to. It was sad, and it was right, and it was both of those at once, which nobody tells you is possible. Took us a few months to get the friendship properly back on its feet, and it’s been solid ever since. She’s round Mum’s most Sundays. We argue about the Falcons’ Seeker. It’s the best thing we ever did, second to giving it a go in the first place — because now we know, don’t we, instead of wondering.”
Harry sat with it.
“Years,” he said.
“Years.”
“I was writing to you both like—” He stopped. “No, I wasn’t, was I.”
“Started that letter about four different times,” said Ron, without heat, which was somehow worse than heat. “Never finished it. It looked mad written down — ‘Dear Harry, weather’s fine, me and Hermione have packed it in, Cannons lost again.’ Some things aren’t for owls. It’s an in-person thing, and now you’re in person.” He shrugged, and moved on. “Anyway, you want the rest of the board while I’m at it? Might as well take it in one go. I’m seeing Padma Patil. Three years, thereabouts.”
“Padma—”
“There was a D.A. do, a few years back — to remember everyone.” He said it kindly, and let the rest of it go by. “Padma came with Parvati. We got talking. Turns out I owed her an apology roughly the size of the Yule Ball, so I paid it, and one thing led to a completely different thing.” The grin that arrived then was one Harry had never seen on him before — no side to it, no punchline coming. “You’ll meet her. And — last one, brace yourself — Ginny’s with Neville.”
“I know,” said Harry.
Ron blinked. “You know? You didn’t know about me and Hermione, but that one got through?”
“Ginny told me herself. When we ended — she said there might be him, one day. She was honest with me on her way out the door. So I’ve had years to be glad about the idea. I just didn’t know it had gone and happened. How long?”
“Two years. Nev’s at Hogwarts, under Sprout — greenhouses’ll be his when she quits.” Ron eyed him, a Keeper’s eye, checking the angle. “You all right with the full board? It’s a lot of board.”
“Ask me again next week,” said Harry. “But — yeah. I think I am.” He found that it was mostly true. “It’s just the pint on Saturday, then. You and me.”
“You, me, and the beard,” said Ron. “It counts as a third.”
The rain had come back by evening, softer, and Hermione’s flat had them both back in it — a shepherd’s pie seen off between them and the plates cleared, two mugs of tea going cold while the fire ticked in the grate and Crookshanks, elderly now and moving like a rug with a schedule, completed his inspection of Harry’s boots by falling asleep on them.
“I saw Ron,” said Harry.
“I know. He owled me at lunch to tell me you were back — as though you weren’t staying in my spare room.” She almost managed to sound put out. “There was a drawing of the beard. It was unkind.”
“You didn’t tell me,” said Harry. “Last night. I sat here assuming, and you let me.”
Hermione was quiet for a moment. Her hands found the Prophet on the table and squared its corners against the table’s edge.
“Because it’s years old and it isn’t a tragedy,” she said, “and I didn’t want it to be the first thing you learned back — you’d have spent the whole night doing what you’re doing right now with your face. And because it was his to tell as much as mine, and he tells it better. He’s made his peace into something he can hand people. Mine doesn’t travel as well.”
“Tell me your version, then,” said Harry. “If you want. I’d rather hear it from you than piece it together out of Ron and guesswork.”
So she told him — the short version, over tea: how the rows that had been courtship at fifteen were just rows at twenty, the same three in rotation; how one day one of them had ended not in a slammed door but in “fine,” and how that had been worse, because you could build on a slammed door.
“And here’s the thing I worked out afterwards,” she said, “which you’re not to apologise for, so compose your face now. Do you ever think we’d even have met — properly met — if it weren’t for you?”
Harry, who had been halfway to the apology, stopped with it visible on him.
“I said compose, not display.” She leaned forward. “It is not a complaint, Harry. It’s just true. Every version of Ron-and-I that ever worked had you in it. The troll, the tent, the war, the trio — we learned to be two-thirds of something, and we were superb at it, and then it was peacetime and you were in Berlin, and we sat across a table from each other and discovered neither of us knew the duet. That isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s. Some structures only stand with all three walls.” She sat back. “We ended it at his mum’s kitchen table, holding hands, both crying. He Apparated me home. As break-ups go it was practically a eulogy.”
“And since?” said Harry. “Anyone—?”
“‘Since’ has been mostly legislation,” said Hermione, closing the subject. “There was one incident involving Viktor which Ginny has appointed herself sole narrator of, and you will hear it from her whether either of us wishes it or not.” She picked up her mug, found it cold, and warmed it with a tap of her wand. “Go on. You’ve been sitting on a question all evening. You do it with your jaw.”
“It’s just—” Harry turned his own mug in a slow circle. “I had it all still standing, is the thing. All that time away, and in my head nothing moved. You and Ron in some flat with too many books. Ginny — somewhere adjacent. All of it exactly where I left it, like a photograph. And I come back and every single person’s happy in an arrangement I’d never expected.”
Hermione looked at him across the table for a long moment, and when she spoke it was gently, but she did not soften the fact of it, because softening facts had never once been how Hermione Granger looked after anybody.
“Not everyone ends up with their Hogwarts sweetheart, Harry. You know that.”
The sentence sat in the kitchen longer than its size explained. She had meant Ron by it, but it also swept past Ginny, and they both looked at their tea for a while.
“Teddy turns seven next month,” said Hermione.
“I know,” said Harry. “I’ll go by Remus’s place soon.”
She smiled as a brief silence passed.
“Right,” said Harry at last. “So everyone’s moved on. New question. Tell me what you’ve been up to. Not the Prophet version. I want the long version.”
He could not have said anything more dangerous, because the long version was several years long and she was two cups of tea past her judgement.
She started, sensibly enough, with phase one — werewolf employment, the fight it had taken, the careers it had opened — and it might have stayed sensible if Harry had only nodded politely. He did not nod politely. He asked what the old guard had tried, and laughed in the right places at the procedural sabotage, and said “hang on, go back, they amended what?” with real indignation, and somewhere in the middle of that her wand came out entirely of its own accord.
“—because this,” she said, and the air over the kitchen table lit up.
The diagram assembled itself out of golden lines: the whole omnibus in miniature, phase two entire — clauses branching into sub-clauses, a little constellation of species-status reviews orbiting the main act, and at the centre, glowing, a map of Britain with the proposed centaur territorial boundaries drawn in silver.
“Phase two,” said Hermione, in the voice other witches saved for their children. “All of it, Harry. One act. House-elf employment with actual teeth, goblin contract rights — the goblins are being goblins about it, which is to say maximalist, contemptuous of the process, and fundamentally correct, which no one wants to hear — being-status review for four species the Ministry’s fudged since the seventeen hundreds — and this—” she tapped the silver lines, and the map obligingly grew — “is the part they said couldn’t be done. Territorial recognition. Actual borders, actual standing. Three hundred years of ‘the herds may remain at the Ministry’s pleasure’ struck out and replaced with land they own. The Forest herds alone, do you know what the boundary commission said when I first—”
He was watching her with his chin on his fist and an expression she was too deep in the boundary commission to read, and every time she paused for breath he said “and then?”, and meant it, and so the boundary commission led to the survey dispute, and the survey dispute to the Wizengamot’s oldest and most decorative obstructionists. At some point the pot was refilled and the kitchen table surrendered to the sofa, the diagram trailing her wand across the room and hanging itself up again over the hearth, and somewhere past eleven the fire had burned low and her sentences had begun arriving with small gaps in them.
“—and that’s why the second reading has to come before the solstice recess, because if Yaxley’s cousin gets his amendment tabled first, the whole schedule—” she yawned, mid-clause, and pressed on regardless — “the whole schedule reverts to committee, and we lose — we lose the—”
“The floor,” Harry supplied.
“The floor,” she agreed, with feeling, and settled back to gather the rest of the sentence.
The fire ticked. The rain kept on against the glass. The rest of the sentence never arrived. What arrived instead, by degrees, was the weight of her head against his shoulder.
The diagram dimmed politely and went out. Her wand slid from her fingers into her lap. The whole warm weight of her was against his side, breathing slow and even, one hand still loosely curled as though holding the shape of an argument.
Harry sat very still.
Nobody had leaned on him in years. Where he’d been, touch was professional or it was arranged — never once careless. And she had fallen asleep on him as though he’d been home all along — as though he’d never given her a single reason not to.
Crookshanks opened one eye, assessed the situation, and closed it again.
Carefully, Harry took her wand from her lap and set it aside. Then he gathered her up and carried her down the hall to her own room, and she stirred just enough to frown at some amendment only she could see. He laid her on the bed, drew the quilt over her, and put her wand on the bedside table where she’d find it. She murmured a syllable that was probably quorum and went under again.
He banked the fire. He washed the mugs, the Muggle way, which took longer, which was — he understood it now — the point. And then he stood a moment in the doorway of the warm room, one shoulder against the frame, taking a last look round: the mended bowl on the rack, the divot in the doorframe she’d refused to let him repair (“evidence”), Crookshanks asleep in the warm hollow she’d left on the sofa, and the last of the diagram’s glow fading over the hearth.
Nothing in the whole long day had needed him — not Ron, who had built a life that fit him like a keeper’s glove; not her, who had rebuilt a good chunk of Wizarding Law while he was off not answering letters. Nobody had needed him for a single minute of it.
He had liked it more than anything he could remember.
The spare room smelled of ink and old parchment, rain sorting itself out over London beyond the glass. Harry lay in the dark with his hands behind his head, and then, right on the edge of sleep, the last thought surfaced — the one the whole day had been standing on without his noticing. The note in his pocket was years old. Nine owls had gone unanswered. And last night, in the dark and the rain, with no warning and no word ahead of him, her wards had known him anyway: no knock, no password, nothing but his hand on the door.
All those years, and she had never once taken him off it. He wondered what he’d done to still deserve that trust.