Now
“I don’t know why you had to hook up with my ex, though,” Hermione complains.
“We didn’t hook up, Hermione, we’re getting serious,” Neville says, trying to stop his lip from quirking up. “We might get married. Any day now.”
Hermione offers a very unladylike snort, the kind she tries to avoid around impressionable children, on grounds of professionalism. “Blaise isn’t the marrying type.”
Neville offers his own snort in return, and she doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at him, even though the school term has technically officially begun yesterday. “He’s absolutely the marrying type. He’s just not the type to marry the fucking Minister, Hermione.”
“I was not trying to be Minister,” she says, throwing her hands up.
“You’re still trying to be Minister!” Neville says, swatting them back down again.
“Well,” Hermione says, with a roll of the eyes, “not until Hogwarts is back on track, that’s for certain, but I’m sure at some point in my two or three hundred years it wouldn’t be too out of the question to give it a go.”
“Mhm,” Neville says, laughing under his breath.
Hermione shoots him a look and, in retaliation for laughing at her, just says, “you know he’s not dropping his thing with Malfoy anytime soon, right?”
“I know nothing about a Thing With Malfoy,” Neville says, primly, just the way Gran taught him to with Open Secrets like that. “I stay out of pureblood politesse, remember?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Hermione says, with a laugh of her own. “You’re impossible to poke fun at, you know that?”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t even try,” Neville tells her, “glass houses and that.”
“Oh? Which of my lovers is off having a secret tryst that is, by all accounts, a love for the ages, behind the back of one man’s politically betrothed wife and the other man’s, if you’re to be believed, deeply beloved fiancé,” Hermione says, like she’s actually curious, and she’s got a straight enough face that Neville almost falls for it, for just a minute.
“Fuck off,” Neville says, when he catches the ghost of a smirk, “you can’t just be blatantly in love with two people since first year and then pretend no one saw it coming because you three had a break for a few years.”
“Language,” Hermione says, in a whisper, elbowing him and clearing her throat and brushing her hair back somehow all during one sweeping step forward. “Teddy!”
Teddy looks impossibly small in front of them, and Neville wonders whether they really could have been that size, well, ever, really, even though he has his first school robe still tucked up on a hanger somewhere just to settle his nostalgia, and there’s nothing to fight with the facts there. Teddy might be a year early, with Hermione’s new policies, but, whether or not any of them can remember it, first year Neville and Hermione were that small, too.
Teddy ducks behind Harry, who sighs, trying not to laugh, and looks to Ron for help.
Ron raises an eyebrow and holds up his hands. “All you, mate.”
“Hi, Teddy,” Neville says, quietly, crouching down. “It’s just me, Neville. You don’t even have to call me Professor Longbottom this year, if you don’t want to. You remember me?”
A tiny head pokes out from behind Harry again, and says, hesitantly, “I’m allowed to be called Thea if I want to. Unty Harry told me so.”
“Then I’ll call you Thea,” Neville says, agreeably, offering his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Thea. I’m still Neville.”
“Are you making fun of me because I’m a girl?” Thea asks, gingerly shaking Neville’s hand. “Or do you not like the name.”
“I’m not making fun of you at all,” Neville reassures her. “And you can have any name you want, whenever you want. Sometimes, when I’m a girl, I go by Neave.”
“You’re a girl, too?” Thea asks, stepping out from behind Harry completely.
“Not every day,” Neville says, with a shrug. “Some days. Not today, though. Today I’m a boy. Hermione’s a girl every day, though.”
“I knew that already,” Thea says, picking up a pronoun pin and screwing up her face as she taps it a few times, trying to get it to say, apparently, she/her. They’re a bit finicky in their ordering still, but they do stay once they’re set.
Neville is still trying to get the spell right that will make his pins shift automatically, but it’s an ongoing process, and he doesn’t see it finishing anytime soon. And certainly he wouldn’t try to offer them out to children, not when being unable to make up their minds would end up leaving them more flustered than convenienced. He never even had much of an adolescent identity crisis, and he still would’ve been mortified on the days he couldn’t make up his mind.
“Are you sure this is alright?” Thea asks, cautiously sitting in a chair not too close to either adult and shifting until she’s comfortable.
“Which is, sweetheart?” Hermione asks, leaning forward, even though she’s already tuned up the spells to make everyone’s voices carry. “We’re all okay with you being a girl named Thea. We’ll tell everyone, if you like.”
“No, I mean,” Thea shrugs, staring down at the ground, “you said lots of people are coming here. Do they really want to meet me?”
“Oh, of course they do, Thea,” Hermione says, shooing Ron and Harry away, “aren’t you excited to meet them? I think you’ll make lots of friends.”
Thea grins hesitantly, waving goodbye. “You really think I’ll make friends?”
“Absolutely,” Hermione and Neville agree in unison, glancing at each other and bursting out laughing, catching Thea offguard enough that she starts laughing too.
First Year
Hermione wasn’t hiding behind her mother’s skirts, and in fact hadn’t done in quite some time, not literally, although she could remember doing so as a small child and so, unfortunately, the metaphor resonated with her every time she read it in a book. And also right now. When she was preparing to meet her penpal for the first time, and worried that he would look at her, well, different. Even though he liked her letters quite well.
And then she thought she’d perhaps been mistaken the whole time, because the family walking up the way to meet her family had with them a child of about her age, about her height, paler coloration but hair almost as curly as hers, and, well. A dress.
It was a fantastic dress of the sort Hermione always daydreamed herself in, with layers upon layers and wiggly sleeves that made her friend look like a fairy princess. The problem with this type of dress was, of course, that Hermione quite liked climbing trees and slipping into cramped corners and running about from place to place and big floofy dresses weren’t conducive to any of that, and she hadn’t figured out near enough about her magic in order to make dust and wrinkles go away, let alone to make things stop tangling about her legs.
But this wasn’t about books or the quiet of nature being most of her companions; she’d known she was going to meet a friend, which would require of necessity a kind of social interaction, and that did make her nervous, but this was something else. The something else, being, of course, that her friend signed each and every letter Neville, and, as far as Hermione had known, that wasn’t a girl’s name at all.
And suddenly Hermione was concerned that she had completely misunderstood something about the magical world, something fundamental in there somewhere, that perhaps boys’ and girls’ names were swapped, or boys wore dresses and now people were going to think Hermione was a boy again. And, being the type of child whose nose was ordinarily in a book, Hermione was very concerned with the correctness of things.
Up until now, Hermione had known many Nevilles. Not in person, as such, though one of her neighbors, who was a boy, had the name, because Hermione didn’t get along easily with the other children, who were often unkind to her, and when they weren’t, their parents were instead. But she’d known many in books, so on paper, it seemed a name that made sense. For a boy. Which was what she had thought she was writing too, except now she wasn’t so sure.
“Neville?” asked Hermione, tentatively, in case she’d worried for nothing, and this was an entirely different child with an entirely different set of expectations attached.
But Neville beamed, and waved, and hurried over to proudly shake Hermione’s hand, and said, to the other set of adults who weren’t Hermione’s parents, “this is how muggles greet each other, you know.”
And so Neville’s parents gamely shook hands with Hermione’s parents, as Hermione stood, baffled, Neville having switched one hand for the other so that they could hold hands and skip down the street, which they then proceeded to do.
They ended up at a bookstore, which was much more reassuring to Hermione. Books were books, no matter where one was, and that had been the first thing she made sure of in her forays into the world of magic and mystery.
“Neville,” Hermione said, now on firmer footing as she held a book in her hands, watching a dragon soar from page to page, “you’re wearing a dress.”
“You’re wearing a skort,” said Neville, who seemed very proud to know the word.
“What?” said Hermione, and then glanced down, and found she was indeed wearing a skort, but that only made sense in the fading heat of late summer when one was on a casual excursion that might involve a fair amount of walking.
“It looks very pretty on you,” Neville said, with a sharp nod, and then, with a surreptitious glance around, a thumbs up. And then a point at the thumbs up, as if Hermione hadn’t already seen it in the first place.
“Yes, Neville, good job, that means you like my outfit,” Hermione said, offering a golf clap, because Neville had indeed used the hand signal right, which meant that her diagrams had paid off. “I mean, why are you wearing a dress?”
“Oh,” Neville said, smoothing the pale green skirts and making them sparkle with blue undertones, “well, I thought I’d get dressed up. It’s not every day you meet a friend for the first time. So I wanted to mark the occasion.”
“I see,” said Hermione, who didn’t see at all, because she wasn’t sure how to word her question in a way that wouldn’t be rude. Then, as the two friends stared at each other awkwardly, she burst out, “are you a girl?” and then clapped her hands over her mouth and sat heavily.
“What?” said Neville, “only sometimes. Not today. Today I just wanted to wear a pretty dress. Why? Do you think I shouldn’t wear dresses when I’m a boy?”
“How,” said Hermione, who was fairly certain she was still being rude, but had become completely overrun by her curiosity, which had shoved her manners overboard and was now steering the boat, “can you be a girl only sometimes?”
“I dunno,” said Neville, with a thoughtful expression, “I suppose I do it the same way everyone else does it. Everyone who does do it, I mean.”
“Sorry,” said Hermione, who wasn’t remotely sorry, because her curiosity was still in charge, “I didn’t mean to confuse. How can one be a girl only sometimes? I’ve never heard of that and I’d love an explanation.” And then, because she was worried that she sounded sarcastic, and she’d learned that, in girls, sarcasm rarely led to the provision of information, she added, “I mean an explanation would be really delightful, I’m ever so fascinated.”
“Well, you’re a girl,” said Neville, cocking his head and staring at her.
“Yes, but I’m a girl all the time,” Hermione said, crossing her arms.
“That can’t possibly be true,” Neville complained, throwing his hands up. “You said in your letters that you used to be a boy.”
“Well, I’m not doing that again,” Hermione snapped.
“I didn’t say you had to do it again,” Neville said, “I just meant wouldn’t you know how it felt to be one thing and then a different thing.”
Hermione paused, narrowed her eyes, and scrutinized Neville, glancing around before leaning in and confiding, “well, I never was really a boy, people just said I was. But they were wrong, you see, they couldn’t tell, because they didn’t ask me.”
“Why did they think you were a boy, then?” Neville asked, but without any of the bravado or disingenuousness or schadenfreude that Hermione had come to associate with questions like that. He seemed genuinely confused, which meant that he could be explained to, and also meant that Hermione got that glow of having information to share.
Except that, as she thought about it, she didn’t really have a lot of information on the subject. “Well, you see,” she said, even though she was now very concerned that he wouldn’t, “people just decide whether one is a boy or a girl.”
“What, strangers?” asked Neville.
“Yes,” Hermione said, as it occurred to her that this was a terrible way to go about things, especially in a world where most people, if she had anything to say about it, agreed that it was entirely unfair to see a woman and decide whether she was good or bad at things because of it.
“Just by looking?” asked Neville, who sounded horrified.
“I don’t suppose just by looking,” said Hermione, who’d been told repeatedly by what were generally reputable sources that there was more to it than that, although at the moment she couldn’t have said.
“I thought girls were just what muggles called witches and boys were muggle wizards and it was all just words, like in French,” Neville said, with a skeptical look, and took the book from Hermione, and flipped to a different page, with a much sleeker, shinier dragon. “This one’s my favorite,” he said, and pointed to the way it dove and spun through a series of rocks.
“French certainly has words,” said Hermione who was by now thoroughly disoriented by the conversation, and not a little distracted by the splashes the dragon was making.
“Well, how can you tell if someone is a witch or wizard unless you ask?” Neville said, as if he’d just finished making his point by saying the most obvious thing in the world.
“I haven’t the faintest,” Hermione informed him, and settled in to compare dragons across several different books, because pictures were all well and good, but they couldn’t tell you anything at all about things like curiosity or friendliness.
“And what do muggles call metamorphmagi, anyway?” Neville added.
Now
Malfoy arrives sometime later, warm and polite enough on the surface, but not quite pointedly avoiding Neville’s gaze, and Hermione tries not to laugh. He has one of the cousins in tow, someone from the French side, and the boy shuffles nervously, repeatedly glancing up at his relative, looking mismatched in clearly muggle fashion and overly fascinated with his new pin.
“Um,” he says, with a trace of an accent, but clearly muted by some time across the channel, “hello? I’m Laurent. This is a group for, um…?”
“I’m Thea!” says Thea, bouncing up to meet the other student – well, not until next year, but it’s still confusing being in Hogwarts and not calling them such – shaking hands a little over enthusiastically, but it seems to settle the boy’s nerves.
“You will take care of him?” Malfoy asks, and it’s not as hostile as either of them would’ve expected, but it is very concerned.
“Of course we will,” Hermione reassures, taking pity on Neville and stepping forward to deal with the man, “we have a full day of activities. We’re making friendship bracelets!”
“That sounds,” Malfoy says, with a slow nod, “fun. Please understand, though, he’s – he’s always been aware of magic, but his parents are squibs, and everyone thought he would be, too, he’s – he’s unused to our ways.”
“Our ways?” Hermione says, raising an eyebrow.
“You know what I mean,” Malfoy tells her. With a slight nod, he adds, “you’ve acclimated well. That’s all I want for Laurent, either.”
Hermione smiles more gently, patting Malfoy’s hand in way which only leads to a slightly disgruntled expression, “we’ll watch out for him. That’s what this club is for, after all. Everything will work out.”
“Alright,” says Malfoy, skeptically, and shows no evidence of leaving.
“Look, Blaise’s sister is coming by soon, so he’ll have a friend, alright?” Hermione says, not quite pushing the wizard out the door. “We’ll see you at pickup time.”
“Wait,” Malfoy says, slightly strangled, “he had questions about potions and I didn’t know the answers to any of them, could –”
“We’ll send you a book,” Hermione says, and almost but not quite slams the door in his face, smiling politely.
Fourth Year
Neville had been in girl mode long enough to switch to the skirted version of the uniform, and kept tugging at the bottom of her pleats. “Blast, I’ve grown again.” Hermione suppressed a surge of jealousy at the other girl; it wasn’t that she didn’t know she could wear the other uniforms if she wanted, it was just that – it wasn’t even that she wasn’t confident in how she looked in them. It was that they said things she wasn’t sure she wanted, and she still, at the end of the day, wasn’t quite sure what she wanted them to say. Or, rather, she wasn’t sure how she felt about the ripples of implications they carried.
“You’re telling me.” Hermione was huddled over a heated stone that she clutched to her middle, her fingers far too tight around it, even though it seared against her skin, “the magic thinks I’m behind on my growth spurts, because witches are supposed to be taller sooner than wizards.” She’d carved the runes into it herself, which she’d read was a kind of right of passage, only it turned out the book was so old that her dormmates either didn’t know what she was talking about or thought it unforgivably passe, and in both cases mocked her over it, not that that was anything new.
“Are you alright?” Neville asked, gesturing at the rock, “you know you’re only supposed to use those for a little while at a time, or you could burn yourself.” Neville, of course, would know. Her family was so old that, even though she’d never have made one herself, there must be dozens all around her house, and not even people’s personal bridging stones either, dozens just. To be useful. In the old days, before they had pain potions, ones that were immediate and intensely effective and contraindicated with her regimen.
“I’d rather have a burn,” Hermione said, curling into a smaller ball. “Why did no one warn me it was going to hurt this much when my menses came in?” Magic, that was the problem. She’d gotten used to magic. She wondered if she could somehow owl order a paracetamol and if that had actually worked as well as she remembered, back before she’d gotten used to taking the easy way out of everything and the one single time she couldn’t everything came to a crashing halt and everything was ruined. She wanted to fight any number of evil wizards. Or fight her menses like it was an evil wizard. The Evil Wizard Menses. She was delirious from pain.
“Didn’t they?” Neville asked, placing her hand carefully on Hermione’s neck and rubbing gently. She always gave the best backrubs. Only now she was being delicate, like she thought Hermione would break under too much pressure, which was fair enough, because Hermione felt like she was made of some material fragile and rare. “Gran always said to me, back when I thought I might take the potions. Congratulations, though, that’s sooner than most.”
“What’s sooner than most?” Hermione asked, looking up at her friend. Couldn’t be. Almost everyone else had gotten all that as firsties, or even before they came to school, Hermione should know, she’d been trying to play along for long enough.
“Well, usually you can’t add the third one until well later than the second, because the body’s magics take a long time to adjust.” Neville laughed and shifted her weight so she could lie down next to Hermione without pushing her off the roof, or jostling her too much. “I guess you’re a prodigy, but that’s no surprise.” Hermione sort of wished she’d get pushed off the roof, though. It had to hurt less. Why couldn’t her magic take over that? Useless thing.
“I don’t want to be a prodigy if it’s going to give me cramps,” Hermione muttered. She shouldn’t have taken it. She should’ve taken one of the other potions that wouldn’t try to do anything to her insides at all. Why did she go and believe her mother that childbirth was a beautiful thing she might like to try one day? It had to hurt even worse than this and Hermione was never ever doing it.
“Well, there’s a potion for that, too,” Neville said, with a shrug. “Don’t ask me, because I’ve never understood a single thing in a cookbook, but there’s supposed to be a dozen that are worth using, and a hundred more that aren’t.” Potions for cramps. Of course there were potions for cramps. Why wouldn’t there be? Hermione was trying to use narcotics for an everyday problem, when here there were – well, magical paracetamol, she guessed. Now how was that going to interfere with everything else she was taking? Only.
“They keep the ones that aren’t?” Hermione asked, sounding far more murderous than she usually did, especially given that Hermione was not typically one to discount the keeping of information, no matter how defunct the uses. She tried to get back into the state of respecting the historical significance, the study of the changes in recommendations and social practices over – but she couldn’t, because the thought of making a whole potion and then it was wrong was making her cry. She wanted to bite someone, which was a strange thought.
“For reference value,” Neville said, soothingly, patting her friend’s neck again, “no one’s trying to use them, darling, no one’s going to make you drink any.” Neville was the best friend Hermione had ever had and no one else had ever understood her even for a second. Then she did cry, which was strange, because she didn’t quite feel like crying anymore. Neville would never make her drink the evil historically accurate potions.
“They better not,” Hermione growled, and if smoke poured out of her nostrils when she said it, well, she was still an adolescent, still prone to the occasional burst of accidental magic under surges of hormones, still unsettled in the way she chose to present her aura to the world. And if she did decide to be one of those magicians who always looked slightly on fire, well, that was no one’s business but her own. The Sizzle Witch. She could open a barbeque restaurant. “Isn’t there a spell to lengthen your skirt?”
“Dozens,” Neville said, pulling a face, not that Hermione could see her expression from inside the imitation of a pillbug, but she knew well enough to hear it in Nev’s voice, “only the teachers can tell if I’ve used one and I’ll get House Points docked, so I’d rather. Not.” Which wasn’t fair at all, because what was the point of a magic school if you weren’t even supposed to use magic? There was a spell, though. She could almost remember the wand motion. Widdershins. Something widdershins. That wasn’t helpful at all.
“What are you supposed to do, then?” Hermione said, throwing one hand up in the air, the other still clutched around the rock and her middle, “just buy infinite skirts in case you need another size? My word, isn’t it horrible enough buying enough dragonhide gloves to get through one semester of potions without wearing through all of them?” It wasn’t just the spills, either, the copper wore through the enchantments faster than it had any right to, and she shuddered to think what was going to happen once she graduated to silver cauldrons. And she wasn’t licensed to recast the spells herself, so it wasn’t technically safe, so if that was allowed in the classroom, that wasn’t any classroom she wanted any place in.
“You’re supposed to go to the quartermaster and get them replaced,” Neville said, with a scowl, shaking her head. “The gloves, too, I think, you should be able to get a few replacements each semester. More in case of accidents.” Every day Hermione learned things about the school she felt she should have known. Perhaps in some kind of student handbook
“We have a quartermaster?” Hermione asked, sitting bolt upright, staring at Neville, who was very clearly trying not to laugh in her face. When she noticed this, Hermione felt significantly less bad for almost knocking her off the roof, which probably would’ve ended fine, because there must be safety features. If there weren’t, she’d have heard of a lot more accidents, wouldn’t she? Probably she would.
“We do, yes,” the other girl agreed, nodding solemnly. “Of course, it is Filch, so you can see why most of us refrain from having our uniforms replaced until we can take care of it ourselves on holiday.” Oh. Of course it was. For all that everything else went out of its way to pretend it was simply concerned for their frustration, the one thing squibs were considered innately gifted at was inventory. Hermione had done inventory over the summer and it was horrible. So Filch probably deserved it.
“Well, I didn’t know that, and I’m going to keep pretending not to know it,” Hermione said, leaning against her friend, “and I shall go about getting any replacements I need directly from Madame Pomphrey, who does not glare at me or mutter about lightning rods.” She’d seen enough retellings of Frankenstein to know what lightning rods meant. A mad scientist, that was what Filch was.
“Are you going all the way to the Hospital Wing every time?” Neville asked, in surprise, finally giving up on tugging at her skirt and spelling it longer anyway, “I’d just ask Professor McGonagall to keep them for me, the way she does everyone else’s medication. She can even get the muggle kind of potions, you know, the ones that vaporize themselves.” Neville made a complicated hand gesture that was probably supposed to indicate something important, but Hermione gave up trying to read into it halfway through.
“I have no idea what you’re describing, Neville,” Hermione said, with a sigh, patting her on the shoulder. A lot of students had a lot of medications. It could’ve been anything. It could’ve been illicit, if someone had tricked McGonagall, or she had pretended to be tricked, or she openly didn’t care. “I don’t suppose you know whether or not she’d be sympathetic?”
“She mostly seems like a sympathetic person to me,” Neville said, with a shrug, rolling over to stare up at the clouds. Hermione wanted to stare at the clouds, too, only if she held completely still then the pain subsided to a dull ache, and she was afraid to test the boundaries of that. “I mean, I suppose she’s not overly emotional, but I don’t know, everyone says I never talk at all, and maybe she just needs to get to know people.”
“You’re shy, Neville, I don’t think she’s shy,” Hermione said, hesitantly. Neville had – well, she’d come around to admitting she was shy, not as much as Hermione might’ve wanted, but enough to at least start getting through to her that many of her faults weren’t her fault, as such, but it wasn’t like it wasn’t still sensitive.
“That’s not what I mean,” Neville said, shaking her head and humming tunelessly while she tried to put the words together. “She might seem distant, but I think she’s, you know. Like a dark chocolate truffle. A little bitter on the outside, but with a warm gooey center once you get to know her, full of hugs and tears and possibly maniacal laughter.” That sounded overly specific, and now Hermione had to be wary about being pranked into giant chocolates on top of everything else.
“I don’t mean whether she’s a sympathetic person, Nev,” Hermione said, with a groan that was possibly more about the conversation than her potions regimen, she couldn’t tell anymore, “I mean is she sympathetic to, you know. All this.” And Hermione gestured at herself, and the air around her, and the whole world, because there it was, all of it coming together to make her uncertain about the authority figure she was supposed to trust most, and maybe did, about everything except this.
“All what?” Neville asked, concerned again, and trying to nudge the rock a little farther away from the exposed skin on Hermione’s hands. She was starting to blister, but the blisters almost felt good, in that they distracted from all the aches on the inside. At least she could ill-advisedly scratch at blisters.
“The whole, you know,” Hermione said, and gestured at herself again, and waved a hand, not dropping the rock in the process because, as Neville came to notice, it was stuck to her sweater with a fairly powerful charm. She’d put it there, in case she was liable to drop the rock. What with the pain and all. “With the potions, and the. Gender.” There had to be a better way of saying this. But it was hard to make herself understood when language was constructed to make her sound like she was the confused one, unable to fit into this nice neat filing system people had decided covered everyone, even dogs.
“Gender,” Neville said. “Like in French?”
“Like in French.” Hermione snorted. “Why is it always French with you? People have genders in every language. Well. Not every language. Lots of them.” She couldn’t remember at the moment. That wasn’t good, that wasn’t good at all. How was she going to go to class? But there were lots of languages that didn’t have gender markers, not even on words about actual human people, and even cultures that – she couldn’t even think of a book title, at the moment.
“Words have genders, not people,” Neville said, and then, with a pause. “Oh, Merlin, you’re right. People do have genders, sometimes. Why would our Head of House have any opinion on that sort of thing, though?” Hermione was significantly too tired to be offended by her best friend forgetting that she had a gender, but she wasn’t too tired to be offended by the other thing, which was possibly that Neville didn’t have to know the why of it.
“Why wouldn’t she?” Hermione asked, extremely put out, and not completely sure whether the conversation or the pain was the primary factor in that. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Her body was supposed to change on a nice, even trajectory, like in all the illustrated medical texts, and not have normal and expected variance like everything else. Just an elegant, textbook transition, was that so much to ask?
“Hermione, beautiful wonderful Hermione,” Neville said, looking her friend right in the eyes, “Professor McGonagall understands that everyone uses their own personalized potion regimen for whatever they want their body to be, and she isn’t going to judge you for using a different one than she did, alright?” And there was annoyance on her face, too, because Neville sometimes got the idea Hermione was judging her for not taking any potions at all.
“Alright,” Hermione said. She needed to take some time to process information she wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly, but that, if she had, changed the nature of the situation drastically. Why wouldn’t anyone have mentioned that her Professor knew just what she was going through? But then again, why would they?
“Morgana’s titties, that one looks just like a soft-shelled turtle,” Neville said, pointing up at a particular cloud. Hermione turned over – because maybe the rock was starting to work after all – and looked up at it, and didn’t believe a whit of it. Neville pulled out her wand to trace the shape and prove it.
Now
The first genuinely muggleborn student arrives escorted by Headmistress McGonagall herself, and seems overwhelmed and delighted by everything around them, grabbing a handful of pins and playing around with them.
“You know,” Hermione says, demonstrating with her own, “you don’t have to use more than one. You can get them to list as many pronouns as you like.”
“What if,” says the student, slowly, “I change my mind?”
“Then you change it again,” Neville says, going through the mechanics of it more slowly so the student can watch. “I change mine at least once a week.”
The student’s eyes widen, and they break into a grin. “We’re allowed to do that? I thought I’d just have to be they always, because everyone said I could do that, but – is it alright if you call me Robin?”
“Of course,” Hermione agrees, noting that down in her student profiles. “How have you been finding things? Got a practice wand?”
“Yeah! I went through a portal in the back of a bank, it was madness,” Robin gushes, almost jumping out of their chair, “is that really real, I’m going to get to use a magic wand?”
“Well, yes,” Neville says, “that’s how –”
“Neville changes his pronouns all the time,” Thea informs the newcomer, “Auntie Hermione doesn’t, she’s always a lady, but Neville does. I do too, sometimes.”
“I’m a boy,” Laurent adds solemnly. “I just say he and be done with it.”
“And no one minds?” Robin asks, leaning in towards their new friends.
“Nope!” Thea takes great pride in popping the word exactly the way her Gran hates, “really it’s the classes you’ll struggle with, they’re awful. I can show you my notes, I already have tutors for half of them, it’s terrible.”
“Half!” Robin says, sounding scandalized, while Laurent looks on intrigued.
Sixth Year
Hermione sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, arms circled around them, trying to make herself as small as she could, despite the fact that the room she was in was expansive and well-appointed, covered in couches and chairs in artfully disorganized arrays, and not many people were in here to complain about her taking up room one way or another. She was aware it was a holdover from early childhood, but that didn’t make it any less instinctive. More, if anything – the knowledge faded into nostalgia at the edges.
“It’s getting worse, isn’t it,” Neave said, sitting next to her on the couch. He had books with him, as if he’d come here to study, which most people did, only he set his bag down by the side of the table and didn’t even open it to pull anything out.
“What is?” Hermione, who could think of many, many things that were getting worse at the moment, asked. Not schoolwork. That was the one constant, ever there for her to deconstruct into formula after formula, factor it down into its component parts and lay them out. She could research, and she could learn, and she could practice, and even when she could do absolutely nothing else, she could still do that.
Neave leaned his head against her shoulder and sighed. “There’s a war coming, and there isn’t anything we can do to stop it, is there?” Neave had been there. Neave had been there for enough of it that Hermione didn’t even try to soften the blow, to slowpedal it like she would’ve for almost anyone else. She could smell it on the wind, like a campfire just gone out.
“No,” Hermione agreed, quietly. “All we can do is fight. Try. Keep going, until we win. I mean, we have to win. There isn’t any other way.” Well, there was another way, there was always another way, but the other way didn’t brook thinking about, because the other way was the way they couldn’t let it be, so. Keep on keeping on, then.
“And then what?” Neave asked, looking at the tiny pockets of students around them, most also wearing troubled expressions. “This may be a war of attrition. What if there’s no one left at the end of it all?” Hermione’s heart stuttered in her chest, because it wasn’t her war, not the same way, not the way that Nev had lost his parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, maybe even a sibling from what he’d overheard his Gran say sometimes when she thought he wasn’t listening. Harry’s family down to him, and Ron’s with only the Burrow and one cousin’s family still around. So many old names down to a single heir to a single family line, and, no, Hermione didn’t know, because her parents were dentists, and that war, her war, it was older than them.
But Hermione could see just as well all the blank spots in her own family tree, all the places that could have (should have) been. Everything left in diaries and precious family keepsakes, and Neave had artefacts where his own relatives should’ve been, and how could she not see it?
Hermione looked at her friend, eyes on his chin, and shook her head, slowly, laying out her words carefully before she said them, the way she always told him to do when he was worried he’d say something wrong, and they felt strange and sharp on her tongue this way, but maybe they were meant to be sharp. “It won’t be a pyrrhic victory. It can’t be, because magic flows, and it won’t stop flowing, no matter how many people use it incorrectly.”
“Alright, we’ve always known you have a way with words,” Neave muttered, rolling his eyes. “You can say anything pretty and inspirational that you want, but it doesn’t exactly help us, does it? We can thank magic all we want, but it’s not going to save the day for us.” He thought she was speaking in metaphors. He thought it was just flowery language, but Hermione was being, as always, deeply practical. Magic was the physical reality of it, wasn’t it?
“That’s not what I meant,” Hermione said, and then grinned at him, something with too much glint in the teeth and not enough glint in the eye. “Don’t you remember who I am? Where I come from?” It was almost funny except that it wasn’t funny at all, and that was the crux of the issue, everyone who was supposed to be here for her forgetting where she came from, as if where she came from wasn’t over and over the point.
“This isn’t going to be where you reveal you’re an extraterrestrial or something of the nature, is it?” Neave asked, elbowing her. “Because I’ve enjoyed those books but I’m not sure I can handle it outside of fiction.” It was a pointed comment, on the books, the muggle books, the ones her parents still collected for her from every used bookstore, sending anything along that seemed strange or interesting or deeply pointless. Neave wouldn’t forget.
And because Neave wouldn’t forget, Hermione could always remind him that he did, because forgetting what and forgetting why were two very different things, and Hermione appreciated people forgetting why they should care that she was different. And so, Hermione smacked him on the shoulder and said, “Nev. Sweet, innocent, Neave. I’m muggleborn. You understand what that means, don’t you?”
Neave shrugged and nodded, pulling a blanket around the two of them. “Well, yes, of course. It means you’re a target. That people forgot to explain things when you got here, and you’ve always felt out of place, and people think you’re not fully part of our world.” Neave, being one of the few scions of the old lines that the other crowd would listen to, had gotten used to saying words over and over again until the blank stares had leeched all the meaning out of them. They didn’t have the warmth of comfort that at least his body heat still did.
“No,” Hermione said, exasperated, then, “well, yes, yes to all of that, but, no, that isn’t the point, Nev. The point is, there will always be more muggleborns. And no matter how many people we lose – and I hope we don’t, but we’ll always lose some – magic will find a way to make itself known. We can’t lose the world, because there will always be more people who find their way to us, even if their families never knew anything about it. We can lose a person, but as long as people are willing to try, we can never lose our people. You know?”
“Ah,” said Neave, tipping their heads together. “As long as there’s one person left to carry on our culture, we can share it. With anyone and everyone. As long as there’s someone willing to teach, and someone willing to learn, there’s hope.” Hermione closed her eyes. She could cry, but Neave, as always, heard what she meant when she said it, and if they only had to give speeches to each other, speeches would be much easier to write.
Hermione stared at him and drew in a breath. Even now, it was often easier to write her ideas down in letters, most of which she never sent, but this was one she’d never penned, so she worried it wouldn’t come out exact. “Do you ever feel lonely, Neave?” He was the only one in their year, and everyone else with just the one gender over and over, and she wasn’t even sure he’d gotten a chance to talk to Tonks, who never seemed to think much of it.
“Everyone feels lonely,” he told her, kissing her nose. “Are you feeling lonely?” and there was another speech waiting in the wings, one that had comforted Hermione before, more than once, but it wasn’t the one she needed now. Honestly, it was so far from the speech she needed right now it threw her off her stride, and she almost forgot what she was trying to say.
“Not in a general sense, I mean.” Hermione tucked the blanket around him and got up to pace, circling the coffee table and crossing back a few times before she started speaking again. “Do you ever feel like people don’t understand you? Like you’re alone in the world and no one quite shares your experience?” That wasn’t right, either, of course, and now she felt like she was either trying to introduce a philosophy book or narrate a mystery show, but it wasn’t her fault that neither of her worlds wanted to offer her the right words to say what she meant.
“Again, I’m pretty sure that’s the human condition,” Neave said, setting his elbows against his knees, and trying not to look at her while she walked in circles. She knew she was making him dizzy. She was making herself dizzy, too, but externalizing it seemed to help, in that bad coping mechanism way her therapist always warned her about. “No one’s exactly like anyone else, and that’s beautiful yadda yadda.” That speech Neave was quite adept at, when he was actually trying to give it, and she’d seen quite a few tears dried on the heels of it.
“I mean,” Hermione said, rounding on him, hands on his shoulders, “do you ever feel like you would benefit from the company of someone who is mostly a boy and sometimes something else, or are you going to philosophize that away too?” It wasn’t as if he wasn’t cooperating, she knew he was cooperating, but this was a time when she needed to be serious and Neave thought she needed a joke, and that wasn’t right! There was too much to do, and not enough time to do it, not if they wanted it done in time for the war so afterwards they could heal without all the planning. Color-coded dates and times didn’t tend to help anyone but Hermione relax.
“Oh,” said Neave, with a nod. “I guess I would, but we’re hard to find.” There was a smile, after that, like Neave was being there for her, but Hermione was trying to be there for him, and it made the whole pitch come off a little sideways, and she wasn’t going about this right at all. She really should’ve written a letter in the first place, that had always worked, always made both of them feel less alone in the world.
“Right,” agreed Hermione, sitting down with a thump. Was this her fault for never looking up a muggle group for Neave to join, like her awkward sessions with other girls who couldn’t quite look each other in the eye? No, that would’ve been worse, probably. “Does that make you lonely?” What was she fishing for? Hermione was talking about herself again, and she knew it, and Neave knew it, too. But he humored her, because she was building to a point.
Neave nodded slowly, watching her for the big reveal. “From time to time. It seems like it’s too hard to describe when I’ve got a feeling about it, so the thoughts go largely unsaid. Aren’t there other girls you can talk to, My?” He patted her hand and what he meant was her meetup, but they weren’t witches, so they didn’t understand. Being a girl and a witch might not be quite the same as being a witch and a wizard and a metamorphmagus depending on the weather, but it was still too many things sometimes, with no one else around.
“This isn’t about me,” Hermione said. With a slight laugh, and a not entirely convincing smile, she pronounced, “this is about the future.” It was about her, but the little her, the one who had been so startled by a boy in a dress that she forgot that people could be different for minutes on minutes, despite penning in her mind all the ways that she was different and sorry for it and that little girl never should’ve had to be either of those things. It was about all the little Hermiones that should be unconfused and proud, only perhaps worded a little better.
“The future?” Neave said, and then, with more certainty. “The future.” He said it too ominously, like he was trying to back up her lecture while never having looked at the notes, but that was alright, because Hermione hadn’t had a chance to look at her own notes yet, you know, the ones that were in her head and only in her head, cramped scrawls of ideas for toasts and a notebook full of timestamps.
“Best time to plan for it is when you need the hope, isn’t it?” Hermione asked, slipping under the blanket with Neave. Here was the coup de grace, the final touch on the explanation she was in the middle of not being able to give. “Alright, so, my plan is we make a club.” And, oh, that wasn’t so hard, was it? It never was to miss all the important points and just say the only bit other people could hear. Although Neave could probably hear about the hope, about the children, hers or his or someone else’s, it didn’t matter, just that something needed to change. They couldn’t win a war just to reestablish status quo.
“A club,” Neave repeated, “at school? Or just school sponsored? That might only work for older students, if we had it in Hogsmeade.” He could see the shape of it, the colors, but here it was, fine-lined in ink and shaded watercolor on the surface of Hermione’s mind, and he only got an impression, and all she could show him were numbers, and he’d never been good with numbers, none of them had, and what good was the arithmantic proof when no one looked at it as anything except a reassurance Hermione was still on top of things?
“Oh, at the school, but not just for students,” Hermione told him, pulling that color-coded notebook out of the ether and setting it in front of them, chock full of sticky notes she still had to beg her parents to owl her every week. “Before school starts, so they can make friends, like we did. Get to know each other, so they don’t feel so alone.” Everything seemed so straightforward in the numbers, except that people weren’t proofs. She wanted everything down to constants and predictable outcomes, but people were fluids, and a person was even less predictable than that.
“Seems a long way to ask them to come, just for a weekly get-together,” Neave said, skeptically, poring over the notes and schedules, squinting at the various abbreviations. But it was coalescing in his mind, in the way that Neave saw things, green and growing, nurtured until they made sense outside of cold hard facts. Hermione was always too scared to lose her place in the argument if she relied overly on emotion, but Neave took the idea and coaxed it to flower, a healthy bloom instead of one born in a fireball of zeal and burning to ash. Take the emotion out of it and enough poking and prodding paved the way for someone else’s feelings to fill the gap, so they could understand, too.
“That’s the other thing,” Hermione said. “Classes. To get them used to magic, yes, and the culture of Magical Britain, and how to navigate the school, and what a school schedule like this will actually look like. Do you know how hard it is to try to relearn how to balance the workload while also actually studying? No. Because you had it explained up front.” She was rambling again, but that was alright, because now it was brainstorming time, and brainstorms were nothing but rambles and debates and messy notes. As long as all the little Hermiones were told not just you’re magical but also you can be a witch.
“I mean, they’re just classes,” Neave said, in confusion, flipping through the pages slower as he figured out what they meant. It was dawning on him, the plan, her plan, what it meant to draw the worlds together, to let each other be seen.
“Yes. And if the muggleborn students have some time to learn what classes they’ll take, and what that will entail, I don’t think it would be that hard either,” Hermione said, and laughed. It wasn’t quite as nervous this time, excited, maybe overly excited, a little bit hysterical because there was, after all, a war on, but. “I’d never considered most of these, you know. So I say we bring them early, part time, and help them figure it out.” How was anyone supposed to learn anything if there were so many things they didn’t even know they could do?
“Where does the gender club come in?” Neave asked, finding the pink stickies and looking through them. Pink might be a little on the nose, but, then, that was always what had helped Hermione catalog her own feelings, so – it was hardly like she had flags.
“We’re not calling it that,” Hermione told him. She had names in mind that were maybe, almost certainly, probably better.
Now
The second muggleborn student arrives with Flitwick in tow, and seems deeply reluctant to let go of his arm, even as it signs in and announces itself. Something about it reminds Hermione of herself, when she was small and new to the world of magic, but she can’t quite put her finger on it. It doesn’t look or sound anything like her. The anxiety, maybe, far too shy for its own good as it takes a seat across from the other children and eyes them warily.
“And that’s all the ingredients you need for that potion,” Thea concludes, proudly, holding up what’s soon to be an intriguing but nontoxic solution.
“I’m hesitant as to the wisdom of all this,” Neville tells Hermione.
“Hush,” she says, gesturing at the children. “They’re having fun. I’m watching to make sure they don’t do anything terrifying or impossible.”
“Is that,” says the new arrival, looking on in consternation, “am I going to have to eat that or anything?”
“What?” says Neville, “no, that’s just a game they’re playing. Why, did you want to see how they do it?”
“Oh,” says the student, Isa, according to the sign-in sheet. “I heard I was going to have to take potions and all.”
Hermione trades a look with her fellow teacher and sits down next to Isa. “You can take as many or as few potions as you like. Nev’s never taken any, and he’s perfectly happy that way. That’s always an option.”
“I’d like to have children someday, you see,” Isa says, and, at Hermione’s surprised look, “someday in the far, far future, not now, obviously.”
“Me, too,” Hermione agrees, patting its arm. “Nearer for me than for you, I think. But the potions don’t change anything about that, you know, not unless you want them to.”
“No?” Isa perks up. “I thought they meant – I mean, the way the teachers made it sound I thought I had to take them to stay here. And they would, you know. Stop that.”
Hermione shakes her head. “Absolutely not. This is all your choice. And, you know, for some people, they make it possible to have children they never could’ve had before. Or, if that interests you, in ways they couldn’t before.”
“How?” says Isa, eyes narrowed and jutting its chin at Hermione.
Hermione beams. “Magic.”
Eight Year, sort of
Headmistress McGonagall adjusted her spectacles and hmmed encouragingly at the proposal, smiling gently at the two alumns in front of her. “We are in the middle of rebuilding.” It had taken months for Hermione to even be able to look at it, except that once she did, everything came rushing back, notes and changes and persuasion, and it almost wrote itself, and where it didn’t, she had passels of people ready to help. Everyone was ready for a change.
“The best time to restructure, I think,” Hermione said, beaming, “if we’re changing so much, we might as well change everything we can get our hands on.” She didn’t mean Hogwarts. She did mean Hogwarts, but that was only because the tendrils of thought Hogwarts put out into the world reached farther than any of the creepers on Neville’s plants, and everyone had always known Hermione was the sort to take over the world. Even if in just a subtle, pulling the strings kind of way. And she was starting to find the right strings to pull.
McGonagall laughed. “Quite. You two can handle this on your own?” It was interesting, Hermione thought, that on her own meant such a different thing, now. She was in charge, alone, yes – well, with Neville – but there were helping hands all over the school, city, country, even the world, if she wanted to reach out. So the question meant, instead: was there enough time. And time was the only thing she could be sure of. The answer to so many questions.
Neville nodded its head vigorously. “Oh, we’ll have our hands full, but we’ve been planning this since before we ever could’ve done it. Hermione’s seen the future and everything.” This was a new one, but Hermione was getting used to it; Neville had started to joke that her predictive capabilities were more notional than notational in nature. It was ridiculous, and slightly irritating, but too many jokes had gone by the wayside in the wake of it all, and they needed something without all that baggage. No matter how many times it insisted on repeating the joke to her, she wouldn’t start to like it, she promised.
“Ms. Granger! I thought you’d disavowed divination as a practice,” McGonagall said, rearranging some of the timetables and pulling up a map of the school to start assigning classrooms to the project. The map had been Hermione’s handiwork, too – incidental, just something she’d made for herself to make her planning easier, and based too much on the Marauder’s Map whose magics had imprinted themselves behind her eyes, but here it was, and how much easier was scheduling when everyone had access at once? And, possibly, knowing the magic behind it might make it easier for her kids to get into trouble, one day. If they asked the right questions of her.
“Don’t listen to it, I’m only working on excellent planning capabilities,” Hermione said, primly, “no premonitions, just pattern recognition.” Dreams aside – and she had to, for her own sanity, believe her dreams were just that, or she’d dither half the morning in bed trying to decipher them – when Hermione saw the strands of the future, she found the ones she liked, and tugged. She could see the future, certainly. And she would make it that way.
“I have no doubt,” McGonagall said, with half a smile that belied quite a few doubts, but Hermione would take it. There was a type of bibliomancy in there, probably, almost certainly something that could be arithmantically worked out if she cared to do it, because Hermione’s planning never had just been planning, but planning was planning all the same. So what if it took magic to organize things into place. What else was magic for?
“We’ll run the whole acclimation program, don’t worry,” Neville said, smiling its most sincere smile at its old professor, who, having seen the trouble it got up to as a student, saw right through it. Hermione tried not to laugh at the expression, which hadn’t once fooled her, not since it started trying – maybe some of the guileless smiles from before it knew it was working a room. Hermione had a way of shuffling people onto a project like it seemed the most sensible thing in the world, but Neville, Neville had a way of making people interested. Neville managed to get them to volunteer their time before it even realized that it wanted help.
“If we sell it as a tutoring program, I don’t think we’ll have much pushback from the more traditional crowd, either,” Hermione said, and then, after a pause, added, “we won’t have time to run it, but more tutors wouldn’t go amiss. Actual tutors, for current students. Or perhaps even continuing education.” She didn’t like to say it – well, she did like to say it, quite a lot, as she ranted in the privacy of her own home to her own friends, but not where it might offend people who hadn’t noticed – but muggle curricula and infrastructure had been updated much more recently than the magical kind, and sometimes. Worked. Better.
“Continuing education,” McGonagall repeated. Not skeptical, so much, more concerned, but then, Hermione kept using words – she was going to drag the entire British Magical School System into the modern age with her bare hands if she had to – that the faculty didn’t know and having to define them. At least Hermione enjoyed defining words. Extensively. To the point where she might have put together a packet with all the things she thought people might like to know and at that point she might as well bind it nicely with a durable leather cover. Which would match the Student Handbook she was writing nicely.
“Older people who’d like to go back to school,” Hermione clarified. “I know some of the universities do it, but I’d think for more casual classes, Hogwarts would seem like a good environment, just on name recognition, to experiment with interests a little.” This was a later step in her 249 step plan, but she had to lay the groundwork, and it wasn’t as if the magical world was wholly unused to the concept of education as a hobby. They just needed home ground to get back to, somewhere safe that they remembered loving learning, so they could try it out again. It would’ve enticed Hermione. It still might, if she didn’t watch herself.
“Ms. Granger, if you can convince someone to run it, by all means, but we just don’t have the witchpower to do it right now,” McGonagall said. She set out tea for the three of them. “I’m not trying to discourage you, but I think you still have a lot on your plate.” She’d seen right through Hermione, of course she had, she always had, but that was the point of having so many steps, wasn’t it? Anyway, maybe she could convince someone to run it. Or Harry could.
“This? All of this will work out just fine,” Hermione said, waving a hand. “We have it under control. This is just five classes – six if I can convince anyone to sign up for Muggle History and Culture – and one club.” This was the way it worked, ideally: children would be told they were magical as soon as anyone found out, and they would learn about the way the magicians lived, and then, critically, crosspollination of cultural ideas in that magical children would learn also of the mundane. Every hand held out. Her children wouldn’t have to live always half a step behind, trying to figure out things people refused to tell them on grounds they ought to know already.
“The club’s the important bit,” Neville added, sipping its tea solemnly. That, and every open hand taken. Raising children to offer help was the easy part. Raising children to take it when they didn’t even know they needed it?
“Yes, I rather thought it might be,” McGonagall said, and folded her hands in front of her. “Go on, I’m already mostly convinced.” Once, just once, before the war, almost on the eve of it, Hermione had gone to her professor for advice. For what she’d thought was advice. And described, instead, her dream for the school, in terms too abstract for McGonagall to prove she had all the inner machinations set already. So she played her part and gave the speech the right way, this time, now that everything was ready to be put in motion.
Hermione took a quick sip of tea to wet her throat and said, “as you know, muggles can be a little bit, hmm, less than understanding about issues of…gender non-conformity, shall we say. And it would help muggleborn students to know that the magical stance on that is quite different, right up front where they know who they can go to for help.”
Neville continued the speech just as they’d practiced, taking its cue from timing, even though Hermione made frantically encouraging hand gestures, just in case it had forgotten their many practice sessions. “But even for those of us who grew up not feeling rejected or threatened about it in any way, that doesn’t always mean we have the most common experiences of gender. Sometimes it can still help to have other people there, feeling the same feelings.”
“And,” Hermione continued, breathlessly, “it will help muggleborn students to see that magical students have genders, too! Wait. No, you know what I mean.” She fumbled her cue cards and bent to pick them up, scrabbling for almost a full minute before she remembered she had a wand, and by then it was too late to finish her sentence.
“I certainly do. I could’ve used a discussion group myself; I dithered for almost three years over whether or not I wanted a uterus in the end,” McGonagall said. “It’s a wonderful idea, assuming you have the time.”
“You keep saying that. I’ve excellent scheduling capabilities, I assure you,” Hermione told her old professor, the sarcastic twinkle clear in her eyes, “they’ve only gotten better since my graduation, and I will be using this skill to the fullest, mark my words.” Some form of bibliomancy, for certain, one that bore more research, assuming she had the. Well. Time.
“Biscuit?” McGonagall said, adding the both of them to the faculty list with a flick of her wand. That one was Neville’s, its constant frustration with being unable to tell who was where at which time culminating in a list denoting just that, with the added benefit of deciding permissions to various castle systems. “I’ve added ginger to this recipe for a little zing.”
Hermione and Neville both reached for the tin, and planning started in earnest.
Now
“I don’t see why I have to be here at all,” says Giada, stomping her feet as Blaise ushers her into the room.
“Peace, Giada, darling, you’re here to help people,” Blaise says, one hand on her head to keep her from running off.
“Besides Laurent, I don’t even know any of these people,” she glares up at her brother. “You’re just trying to trick me into doing a favor for your boyfriend.”
“It’s a bribe, not a trick, little one,” Blaise says, as he pushes her into a chair. “You can teach them that new card trick of yours, hmm?”
“I suppose,” Giada says, but she’s pulling out a pack of cards even as she acquiesces. “I am doing you a favor, though, you remember that.”
“It doesn’t work as currency if you have to say it outright,” Blaise reminds her, and gives her a kiss on the cheek, walking over to embrace Neville.
“Blaise,” Hermione says, and if her voice is a little chilly, well, maybe he should’ve put a little more effort into reaching out.
“Hermione,” Blaise says, daring her to add anything else.
“Enough, you two,” Neville says, with a snort, physically pulling Blaise back. “This is about the children, not. Whatever this is.”
“Whatever!” Hermione and Blaise say in unison, and then, with a scathing look at each other, break off, both attempting to look like they’re taking the high ground.
“I’m still making efforts to round up more of the magically raised, but they don’t see much need for a group like this,” Blaise says, tipping his head against Neville’s. “I’m sorry, my love. I believed your argument.”
“I hear wedding bells are in the air,” Hermione says, overly casually, with an almost sincere smile.
Blaise one ups her with his own beaming grin. “They certainly will be. You’ll just have to wait to be dazzled by the proposal, now, won’t you?”
“I’d be dazzled if you even remembered to make it to the restaurant for it,” Hermione says, just a hint of sadness in her voice. “Is Nev planning his own proposal for you?”
“You know, I’m going out of my way to support your club,” Blaise tells her, arms crossed and stepping away from Neville.
“I could’ve sworn you said, just a moment ago, it was a good idea,” Hermione tells him, stepping forward just slightly.
Blaise sighs. “Yes, alright, I’m sorry I didn’t call, Hermione, can we move on?”
“Why does Blaise have boobs today?” Laurent asks, in a voice that carries just slightly too much, and is promptly slapped by Giada.
“Laurent!” she says, and offers absolutely nothing in the way of explanation.
“You know,” Hermione says, turning to the gathered crowd. “I thought a very similar thing when I first met Neville. Would you like to hear about it?”