Summer V
After Diagon Alley Harry was absolutely certain Malfoy was up to something and would not shut up. He berated Hermione for her poor performance in Borgin and Burke’s. (As if he had any better ideas.) He talked Ron’s ear off, according to Ron, before and during his sleep at night.
“A Death Eater,” he insisted, when he thought Mr. and Mrs Weasley weren’t listening.
“A Death Eater!” he said, while mucking out the chickens with Ron.
“A Death Eater,” he hissed, while Hermione and Ginny were trying to focus on their chess game.
He even brought it up during dinner, about a week before they were slated to leave. Bill and Fleur were out, so it was just the rest of the Weasleys, Harry, and Lupin, who insisted that he was just stopping by to drop something off and it was quick, no, he couldn’t even have a cup of tea, but Mrs Weasley chose that moment to pull out the roast and oh how could he refuse the smallest of bites and oh, okay, if she really insisted he would sit down and have a proper plate.
“In Borgin and Burkes,” Harry said, “buying a Dark object. Come on, couldn’t he have joined up over the summer?”
Mr. and Mrs Weasley tried to keep Lupin engaged in a precipitous conversation that lurched between poorly-concealed Order business and Quidditch, but it was clear most of their attention was falling on Ron and Ginny.
“He isn’t of age,” Hermione said, prodding her carrots.
“We know he’s a slimy little bastard,” Ron said, ignoring his parents’ glares, “but Hermione’s right, Harry. He’s just slinking around because he’s blond and nasty. He can’t help it, the poor thing. It’s in his blood to be creepy. Pure creepy, actually.”
That made everyone laugh, except Mrs Weasley, who put on that flagging frown of a mother’s last resort. She knew it was a losing battle, and tried to curb their language at the table, anyways.
Ginny chimed in. Fred and George were the twins, but Ron and Ginny were peas in a pod, and they were one-upping each other, ignoring Mrs Weasley’s repeated attempts to warn them not to continue, until they had insulted Malfoy, his mother, and his future children and grandchildren, and Harry was loosening up, like a stormcloud had left his face, and the only evidence was his hair shot straight every which way by the odd lightning, and even making a Malfoy crack or two of his own.
“He’s spoiled so rotten,” Harry said. “Do you remember, when he made the house-elves redo his tea?”
“Blimey, he’s a right little fuck,” Ron finally said, and threw down his napkin, bemused but content. Ginny grunted.
Somehow, it was fuck that crossed the line. Hermione had not known that Ron or Mrs Weasley knew what it meant. “Ronald Bilius!” she snapped. “You keep your language clean in this house!”
Ron rounded on her with unexpected vitriol. He stood up and knocked his chair back into the wall. “Mum, lay off! His dad was arrested for trying to kill us! Yeah, that’s right! In case you didn’t remember, Lucius Malfoy and the Death Eaters tried to kill us!”
Ron’s chest was heaving. The afternoon before Harry came, they were sunning themselves in the garden, and Ron took off his shirt. Hermione teased him for being pale, and then he half-smiled and twisted to the side and she saw the scars from the brains in the tank of the Department of Mysteries still shimmering around his torso. He told her, quietly, that sometimes he’d wake up because his blankets were sticking too much to his chest, but he didn’t feel comfortable sleeping with nothing on top. It didn’t feel safe anymore. He hadn’t mentioned the Ministry since.
“They tried to kill us!”
Ron’s voice tore around the room again. Mrs Weasley put her face in her napkin, but Hermione already had seen the tears leaking out of her eyes. Lupin put a hand on her back.
“They’re killing Muggles now! That’s how it started, last time, I’ve been reading. Muggles and Muggleborns, and then—blood traitors. I know you try to hide the papers, Mum, but I’m not a child!”
“Don’t speak to your mother like that,” Mr Weasley barked, which caught everyone off-guard. Mr Weasley was almost always jocular. He could barely keep a straight face when telling off Fred and George. His voice dropped to a speaking pitch, and it made him sound, if anything, far scarier. “Sit down, Ron.”
Ron sat.
“Let’s just have a pleasant meal,” Mrs Weasley offered, in the tense silence. “It’s our last night all together before Christmas.” She was trying to keep the tears out of her voice, and failing.
Ginny got up and went upstairs. Her parents didn’t chastise her for leaving her plate. They just stared, dully, looking at where she had sat. She wondered if her parents ever looked at her chair like that while she was away. Surely not. They missed her. But they didn’t worry about her, in the same way, because they didn’t know.
“Regulus joined the Death Eaters when he was underage,” Lupin said, eyes fixed on his plate. “He was a sixth-year.”
“Regulus?” Hermione asked. The name was familiar. She noticed that Mr Weasley had dropped some of the roast down his front. Mrs Weasley seemed angry. Her face was tight and her mouth was pinched.
“He was the Black heir, after…”
Right.
Harry’s grip tightened around his fork. It felt like everyone watched him swallow. “So it can happen,” he said, and pretended to calmly set his fork on his napkin. His hands were shaking. He put them in his lap. They were still shaking.
“Sometimes,” Lupin agreed, and looked at Harry, but Harry’s head was cast down. Hermione thought she saw a tear slip down his face.
Ron and Hermione exchanged a look. Change the topic, Hermione thought, wildly. Anything.
“Lupin,” Ron said, “I’ve had a thought for Order pamphlets. There was a section in the books Harry got for Christmas last year, about home-defense spells—might be nice, yeah? ‘Specially for Muggleborn wizards?”
Well. It didn’t defuse very much. Mrs Weasley’s lips were white, as they always were when Ron brought up official-unofficial Order business. Harry was staring at his plate because, oh, fuck, those books had been a Christmas present from Sirius. But it was better than anything Hermione would’ve said.
Lupin looked impassive.
“It’s a good idea,” Hermione said.
Mrs Weasley couldn’t help herself. “Don’t encourage it, they’re still children!”
Mr Weasley just looked tired. “Children with more organizing experience than some of our mid-level members.” But then he looked at Hermione and winked. “And they come up with some clever ideas. Cursing the sign-up, eh? Clever way to catch a spy.”
“Arthur—”
“Maybe a seminar,” Hermione said, desperately, “would Dumbledore let you come to Hogwarts? Or Slughorn, I’m sure he’d let you do a lecture. I’m sure a lot of Muggleborn students are scared for their families…”
She hadn't been subtle. She could tell Lupin could tell what she meant. The implications seemed to stay out of focus for Harry and the Weasleys, though. Harry was surely lost in the Ministry. And Ron and his family were trying not to acknowledge that they were truly battling Voldemort now.
“Harry, dear,” Mrs Weasley said, “would you grab the pudding? It’s in the fridge. And Hermione, would you take out the dessert plates with the gold rims? Ron, you’ll be on dishes with Ginny, go up and tell her.”
“My last night,” Ron groused, “and you’re making me do housework.”
“It’s only because we love you,” Mr Weasley said, and leaned over and flicked Ron on the nose, which made Ron smile. Hermione liked Ron’s smile. It was bright, the kind of bright that was infectious, so she was smiling, and then she was giggling a little bit, which made Harry giggle, and then they were laughing, the three of them, over a little more than nothing, and out of the corner of the eye she saw the adults’ shoulders relax, and before she knew it, they were laughing too. But Lupin caught her eye. Talk to me, he mouthed, and then he looked away, flashing one of his careworn smiles at Bill, and for a second Hermione wondered if anything had happened at all.
***
Hermione slipped outside while Ron was doing dishes. It was a rainy night and Lupin sat in the garden, smoking on the stone bench shaded by the rambunctiously overgrown hedge. She perched as far away as she could from the smoke and worked up the courage to speak.
He gave her an opening after half of a cigarette. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
She couldn’t take it. “I don’t.”
He blew out the smoke. It wasn’t heavy. It was light. It must be magical.
She looked at her lap. She sat with him for another half a cigarette, listening to the sound of pattering rain. She laid out her fears. She watched the water running across the pavestones as she talked. When she was done she watched his hands. transfigure his cigarette into a paper flower, and set it on fire. Then he lit another one. He smoked all of it and blew out the last bit in lazy rings.
She waited for a sign that the rain would break. Didn’t see one. “I wanted to say sorry,” she said abruptly.
He let the silence drag.
“For me, Ron, and Ginny the other week…”
His shoulders tensed, and relaxed.
“...It wasn’t very nice.”
He snorted. She waited for him to react, but he said nothing.
“Especially the part about Sirius.”
At that Lupin exhaled sharply and sat up straight. “Right,” he said, and lit a cigarette, despite already having one in his mouth. “What do you really want to say?”
Are my parents going to die? But she couldn’t say it. Her throat wouldn’t let her. Like she was allergic to the words. Finally, she managed, “Why aren’t there any Muggleborns in the new Order?,” but that wasn’t what she wanted to say.
“There are a few. You can’t meet them, unfortunately, since you aren’t an official member.”
“I mean why didn’t any come back? I was at Grimmauld Place all last summer, and…” Unexpected faces. Kingsley Shacklebolt, Professor McGonagall, and Professor Snape. Sacred 28, half, half. There were double the amount of half-bloods to Muggleborns, but still, it couldn’t be right that the Order was half pureblood, that didn’t make sense. Since her conversation with the Weasleys, Hermione had the distinct feeling that they were hiding something. She didn’t know why she felt like Lupin would tell her the truth. Maybe it was because he looked like he had a lot of secrets, too, and someone who carries a lot of secrets knows which ones to free and which ones to keep. Or maybe it was the way he looked at Harry, like he understood more than anyone else, but couldn’t bring himself to admit such a radical truth. They had lost the same people, after all. It was just those people meant such vastly different things.
“What do you really want to say, Hermione?” His eyes, illuminated by the cigarette, looked mournful. She hadn’t known he could read people like that.
“In July,” she said. “You mentioned the Frasers.” And then the words tumbled out in a rush: "Where are the Muggle-borns in the Order? Did they all die? Did their families die? Did--" she stopped herself before she could cry. God. She must look pathetic.
“The Frasers,” Lupin repeated, softly. “I was still in school. At James’ house, actually, for Christmas.” Then he cleared his throat. “Muggle-borns in the Order—their families were worse than expendable. There weren’t that many, to begin with. There were none by 1981.”
When James and Lily died, Hermione thought.
“It’s obvious to most people raised in the Wizarding world who has a wizard last name and who doesn’t. It’s transmitted to them through a million different ways. Children just model their parents. That’s where it starts, at home. And then on the playground, when they get to Hogwarts, and have to establish their peer groups. They’ve learned the quickest way from their parents, which is to ascertain whose last name meets what—Jones, of Gwenog? Or Jones, of Hermia?---to which people, so they can figure out how to talk to each other.”
Hermione mulled on his words. Then his words hit her: people. Modeling. Playground. Peer groups. The mundane comparisons, the psychological vocabulary. She could be talking to her Aunt Emma, a social worker for the city of Reading.
“Who raised you, Lupin?” And where? He was a halfblood, but…how did he know such Muggle words?
He looked right at her. “You’re worried about your parents, then.”
She nodded.
“You’re a clever girl,” he said. “I’m sure you thought of something.”
Hermione shook her head. “No,” she said, “I haven’t, I don’t know, I can’t—” and the rain kept pouring. She felt like joining it. “I—I—”
“In the first Order, I mostly did research,” he said. She smelled the cigarette smoke, but it was faint, and a little pleasant. Magical cigarettes, then. “I looked into prophecies, but I mostly did a lot of defensive research. Protection spells, wards. Ways to make the Order safer.”
The admission opened something she hadn’t considered. Hope. “So you’re saying…you know a way? To keep people like my parents…safe from harm?”
He paused. “Not for Muggles,” he admitted.
Hermione’s hope collapsed. “Rubbish, then,” she snapped.
He held up a hand. “Wait.”
She sat back down.
“There isn’t a good way to safeguard Muggles, even if magic works the same on them as it works on us,” he explained. “Almost all of our magic isn’t designed for the benefit of Muggles. Fidelius Charms, Caterwauling—Muggles can’t see those. They wouldn’t recognize the signals that protection spells are failing, or have any way to fight back. You could Transfigure them into inanimate objects, but that would be a hassle to sort out with Muggle police, and might cause some raised eyebrows in the Ministry. You need them going about their normal life, as best they can. Most Muggleborns decided that meant hiding with them. Leaving the magical world entirely.” He stretched and sighed. “Would you leave the magical world?”
Would she? If it meant her parents would be okay? Her grandparents? And Marc. She tried to say yes, but she stopped. She’d been working so hard for five years, for what, a regular A-Level? If she left the magical world, what about— “Who would be there for Harry?”
She blinked. She hadn’t meant to say that part out loud.
But Lupin only glanced at her. He blew some smoke out into the rain. “That leaves you with memory magic, then. If your parents’ identities are changed, and if they go somewhere else, oh, I don’t know, Australia, they might have a chance. Even if they just go abroad, as long as they go far. Out of Europe, for sure, and I think North America is out, too. The wizards over there are struggling with Muggle strife of their own.”
Identity changed….identity changed. Memory magic. That was hard. And dangerous. Would Hogwarts even have books on it?
“I don’t want it to be permanent,” she said, softly. “In case I want to find them again.”
“You wouldn’t,” he agreed. “Your best bet is probably something experimental. A journal, where some wizard was experimenting on oh, I don’t know, the Pensieve.”
“How long do I have before they come for…” Her mum and dad appeared before her, but Hermione couldn’t bring herself to say their names. Then she thought of her grandparents. Aunt, uncle. Marc. She tried to let his words sink over her panic, push it out of her brain like the sun scattering clouds but she was just thinking about Marc, getting off the train for summer break, and rolling his suitcase down the bumpy pavement, whistling, jauntily, like he said everyone in America did. Rounding the corner and bounding up the lane until he was staring at his house, which looked unusually uninviting, with a strange smoky mark over the top: a snake and a skull, which momentarily drew fear he tried to tamp down by calling for his mum, but when he opened the door, it wasn’t his mum, it was a stranger in a silver mask, and Marc said no more.
Oh, she was stupid. No, worse than stupid: she was useless. Useless, stupid, good for nothing—
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Lupin said, sounding gentle. He sounded far away, like he was talking to her from the end of a tunnel. “You’ve got a long time. They won’t go after Muggle families of wizards until they have everything in place. We think not until they’ve overthrown the Ministry, or at least tried to. Blood purity is a tempting form of bigotry, but most wizards in Britain now have at least a little Muggle blood, quarter or half. It’ll be complicated. Almost all pureblood families include at least three half marriages.”
“Right.”
“Blood traitors are probably a bigger risk at this stage.”
She thought of Ron, and felt queasy.
“Or Muggles with no connection at all to the Wizarding world—they’ll be considered soft targets.”
She squeaked, and tried to stuff it down. She couldn’t help herself. Would Marc be a “soft target?” She felt his hand, scarred and rough, in her hand.
“Please. Don’t worry. I will help you, Hermione. If you’ll take it.”
Her voice sounded so very small. “How will you help me?”
And why? she wanted to ask. But maybe this was just a stroke of luck. She needed someone like Lupin—an experienced wizard who could tell her the things she couldn’t find in books, like Harry and Dumbledore. And she wasn’t Harry, so she didn’t have Dumbledore.
“I’ll send you a letter in the fall,” he said. “Start looking in the libraries at Hogwarts, and we’ll met. Tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what I know. We’ll find something.”
She didn’t know why that made her feel slightly better, but it did. Smallest bit of hope, flickering and glimmering. She breathed through her mouth until her hands seemed less far from her face. An apple is delicious, she thought to herself, but a banana is tastier. She looped the song until it felt like her lungs were clear. Lupin kept smoking, but he sent his exhales far away from her, and she smelled nothing but the sweet scents of the garden. Jasmine and gardenias and wet grass and stones. They sat in the summer dark, the two of them, breathing in the nighttime air, listening to the rain.
“How is Harry?”
Hermione thought about how to answer. She didn’t have anything good to say, and Lupin had seen him already. Too skinny, even after a substantial amount of Mrs Weasley’s food. Haunted. Obsessed with Malfoy, not because he hated Malfoy, but because Malfoy was the closest on which to project everything in him that stewed and swirled, representing everything he could’ve been and wasn’t. Adrift. He was like this, or some version of this, every summer, but it had gotten worse.
“He misses Sirius.”
“Well.” Lupin stubbed out the cigarette on the bench and threw it to the ground, stomping it with his shoe with a hiss. “Don’t we all.” When he removed his foot, Hermione saw that the cigarette ash had smudged into a crescent shape. Moony, she remembered. Padfoot. Prongs. She wondered what he was thinking about. He had many more memories of Sirius than her. She pictured the two of them at her age, wearing her student robes, sitting in the Common Room. Awful young. With silly nicknames that made them feel oh so clever. In her mind’s eye, she was imagining Harry’s dad pulling his hair in frustration like Harry. Padfoot reaching over to mess with it, like Ron did. Moony hiding a smile behind his hands, doing his best to keep the peace.
The real Moony sighed. “I got Sirius into cigarettes, and then he was a fiend. Bigger into nic than me, can you believe it? Sometimes we went through half a pack, a full one, until we couldn’t see the ceiling of our room. It made us dizzy, in a good way. We’d play records, make animal shapes in the smoke.”
“You lived together?”
“We were roommates in Hogwarts with James. And…well. Pe—our other friends.”
He pulled out another cigarette from the pack, turned it over in his hands, and put it back. Took it out again and played with some of the paper again. Put it back. Rubbed the gold ring he wore on his left hand—odd. He hadn’t worn it when he’d taught at Hogwarts, and Hermione was sure she’d know if he’d married. She watched the shadows deepen across his face. What would that be like, she wondered. The shock of it all. He used to say Peter in a different way, in her third year, and now he couldn’t even bring himself to say the whole name. His voice croaked on Sirius.
“We lived together in London, for a time,” Lupin said, and then stood up hastily, slipping the cigarettes into a pocket, and started walking away stiffly, favoring his hip, from the bench. “Goodnight, Hermione,” he called over his shoulder, but his words were mostly swallowed by the steady drumbeats of the rain.