Chapter Text
At seven in the evening, on September the first, Hermione Floo’d into the living room of the house she shared with her family in Ottery St Catchpole. She shrugged out of her purple robes, eschewing, for the moment, her usual Freshening and Cleansing Charms, and instead draped them over the back of the recliner.
Fortescue, the family Crup, nosed fretfully against her legs, his forked tail twitching. She bent and scratched him above the tail, and he threw himself to the ground, legs in the air, offering his belly hopefully.
“Poor Fort,” Hermione said, stroking him, and Fort looked at her deeply as if to agree that he was deserving of much pity. “I know. It’s hard being left behind. But they’ll be back.”
She hadn’t taken more than a handful of steps into the house before tripping over a pile of Hugo’s Muggle model spaceships (she had been pretending for some years not to notice that they had been enchanted to fly) that had somehow twitched their way out from under the table. She smiled a little sadly, nudging the pile out of the traffic area with her foot. This weekend she would clear the main floor of the children’s debris, she decided. Right now, the reminder of them was pleasant, if a little achy.
Beneath the smell that she could only term ‘home’ (a mixture of cereal, Crup and clean robes), Hermione smelled the familiar scents of crushed grass, broom polish and sweat. He’d beaten her home, then. A bit surprising, given that it was still light out.
“Ronald?” she called.
“Up here, ’Mione!” he replied from the vicinity of their bedroom, and she wearily made her way toward the sound of his voice.
She found him emerging from their bathroom, dripping wet and clutching a faded blue towel around his waist. She kissed him briefly on the cheek before collapsing onto their bed, hands beneath her head. The position caused her jumper and skirt to pull tight across her body and made it slightly difficult to take a full breath, but she felt too exhausted to move.
“Rough one, then?” Ron asked.
“A little worse than when Rose first went,” Hermione admitted. “But we had a long day in the courtroom to distract me—you know that Auror that—”
“Got a little too free with the Obliviates, yeah,” Ron finished for her. “You told me that was coming up. Azkaban?”
“No,” she said. “Sensitivity training at St. Mungo’s, if you can believe such a thing.” She shook her head. “I’m the first to admit that there can be… circumstances… that sometimes you can’t wait for official authorization, but the Obliviate affects the brain; I mean, that’s your very self, isn’t it? If you need ‘sensitivity training’ to be reminded that you can’t just run around… and with no record keeping! We’ll never be able to find those people and undo that kind of damage.” She stared angrily at the ceiling.
Ron sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed her forearm consolingly. “Poor ’Mione,” he said softly. “Sent her babies off to Hogwarts and then had to deal with the incompetents at the Ministry. I believe this calls for takeaway.”
Hermione snorted. “We always have takeaway on the first of September. Ever since Rose was a first year.”
“Because it’s always a hard day, and we always deserve it,” Ron said, a smile twitching around his lips. He stood and began dressing. “You haven’t asked how my day was.”
“How was your day, Ronald?” she asked, playing along, but interested all the same. Hermione couldn’t quite remember why she had begun calling him Ronald. It had been some sort of inside joke, years ago. Perhaps it had been a dig at the way she would sometimes come home from work still formally addressing her family as if they were fellow Ministry workers, or perhaps it was after an argument, as some kind of apologetic endearment. In any case, it had stuck.
“It was… interesting,” he said.
“Mmmm?”
“Well,” he said, “I’m not really starting class until tomorrow, so I thought it would be nice to kind of… get to know each other, you know…”
“So you took them to play Quidditch.”
“Yeah.” He looked an odd mixture of sheepish and defensive and proud.
“A bunch of children, not even of school age—certainly not supposed to be using magic—” She was scolding, but there was no heart in it. Ron’s neighborhood Quidditch games had been going on for years and were famous among the children. The games had been, certainly, what kept her own children in such demand over the years, and most likely why Ron now found himself tutoring those local magical children not yet old enough for Hogwarts in reading, writing, and basic mathematics, as he’d done his own children before they’d gone to school.
“Finn Jordan is actually only six,” Ron said conspiratorially, his eyes twinkling, scooting away from her as if dodging her imminent attack.
“Six!” Hermione said, struggling into a sitting position. “Ronald, that really is too young. We didn’t even let Hugo have a toy broom until he was—” She sized him up for a moment. “You know what, I don’t even want to know when you decided to give Hugo a broom behind my back. I can see that you’ve decided now that he’s safely away at Hogwarts, you’re going to begin springing these things on me.”
“How can I be springing anything, ’Mione? If anything it’s already sprung.” He looked for a moment like the boy she’d known at Hogwarts, pretending at innocence and sparkling with mischief. “But, in any case, I’ve learned my lesson. Finn flew up a tree somehow—”
“On a toy broom?”
“Yes, on a toy broom, I swear. It only had the very slightest modification. He shouldn’t have been able to get above three feet off the ground, but I think his magic just sort of… helped things along, and before I knew it, he was up the tree, and I went up there to get him and—”
“Oh Merlin, he didn’t fall, did he? The nightmare of keeping the Ministry out of it the last time you had a Quidditch injury—”
“No, he didn’t fall. Let me finish, Madam Doomsday. He didn’t fall, but he erected some kind of shield around himself. I couldn’t get near him for nearly a quarter of an hour! That kid’s going to be a great Auror someday.”
Hermione smiled a bit inside, but kept her face impassive. She had her role as the stern one to maintain, even with the children gone. “How did you get him to lower the shield?”
“Just talked to him,” Ron said. “It was mostly fear that made him put it up—fear of falling, fear I’d be angry that he’d gotten so high. He just had to realize that I was still daft old Mr Weasley and that I’d get him down again.”
Finally, she did allow herself to smile. “You’re good with those kids,” she said.
He grinned and gave her arm a final pat. “Glad you think so, Your Honor. Now, about that takeaway. Chinese, Indian or pizza?”
***
Hermione twirled a curly noodle around her fork. “Does it help?” she asked.
Ron chewed thoughtfully for a moment as if he were seriously considering her question and then broke in to a sheepish grin. “Does what help?”
She huffed slightly. “Being around children?”
“Bit soon to say, yeah? It’s only been one day. Still, though, it helped when Rosie went, having Hugo around. So I imagine it will.” He paused, about to lift another forkful of Lo Mein to his lips. “You’re having a rough time, are you? You said it was worse than when Rose went.”
She smiled vaguely at his concern.
“I think, with Rose… Rose was so ready to go. I was so ready for her to go.”
Ron chuckled. And Hermione managed to smile at the memories of epic battles with her daughter.
“Hugo was always so much more… mine.”
Ron put down his fork and picked up her hand. “Give it a few days. You were heartbroken when Rose left. But you got used to it. And you will again.”
“I know.”
Ron resumed eating, but Hermione let her attention drift away from dinner. No matter what Ron felt he had to say, it was true—Hugo had always belonged more to her, with his thick glasses and his Muggle science fiction and his potions. He was the quiet one, more apt to spend the afternoon in his bedroom comparing what he’d learned from his father of Muggle maths with his mother’s first-year arithmancy texts. He was the one who’d spent weeks buried in her father’s copy of The Lord of the Rings, and who had asked her very solemnly for help in locating Lothlorien. It had broken her heart a little, that the magic that infused their lives and made the world seem so limitless to him could not provide the wood-dwelling elves of his fantasies.
But Rose. Rose had been, almost from the very beginning, like a changeling. Oh, it hadn’t stopped Hermione from adoring her, even when things were at their worst between them; or from marveling at her silken red hair; the way Hermione’s own large, serious brown eyes sat twinkling vivaciously in Rose’s face. It wasn’t even that Hermione didn’t think the best of her, only that she could never seem to quite join Rose. It was as if they were always standing on opposite sides of the street.
Rose had loved Quidditch and dress ups and dolls. Hermione remembered with a wince an early manifestation of Rose’s magic in which all of her babydolls had begun to wail simultaneously, refusing to lie quiet and dormant again until Rose had personally comforted each one. Hermione, investigating the noise, had found the child in her bedroom, red-faced and panicking, leaking a few tears herself as she tried to mother seven babies into silence. A simple Finite had solved the problem, and Hemione had rocked a tearful Rose and assured her that, for now, it was fine simply to be a little girl.
For that had always been Rose, eager to grow up, eager to share in the mysteries of young adulthood. Hermione had been appalled when Ginny had sent the girl a subscription to Witch Weekly for Christmas the year Rose was ten, but Rose had loved it, and her grooming sessions (already of marathon length) took on epic proportions as she tried her hair and makeup—makeup! Was Ginny trying to kill her?—in the styles she found in the pages of the magazine.
Hermione was glad, of course, that Rose could have a different sort of childhood than she herself had had. Wasn’t that what she’d been fighting for? A different sort of world? And if Rose had frills and crushes and pick-up Quidditch games where Hermione had had terror and lessons etched into the mind with blood, well, that was as it should be. She knew that.
And if she had always suspected that Rose would have preferred Ginny for a mother, she tried not to let it bother her. Ginny with her waterfall of red hair, so like Rose’s own, and her stylish Muggle clothing and her Quidditch.
And her youth. How did she manage it? To seem so young, still, after James, Albus and Lily, after everything they’d been through? Some days, Hermione just felt so tired, and there was so much yet to do, so much that had been left just as it was, as if waiting for some new Dark Lord to happen along and pick up where Voldemort had left off.
After twenty-one years at the Ministry—fifteen of them as head of Magical Law Enforcement and ten as Chief Witch of the Wizengamot, Hermione wondered if she would see the changes she’d hoped for in magical law in her lifetime.
She would never say that aloud, of course. She was barely forty years old, and not even approaching what would be middle age for a witch… there was plenty of time left. But still, it was frustrating to wait, to work for months on laws that would not make it through the Wizengamot, to plan and revise, to use all the proper channels… It stood in stark contrast to her childhood, when it had seemed that everything changed so fast, when she could decide what was right and simply act.
Hermione’s musings were interrupted by Fort’s frantic barking, and she looked up to see a large, tawny barn owl soar into the open living room window. She looked at Ron.
“Well, here it is. The big news.”
He grinned and jumped up to fetch the owl treats from the mantle, while she detached the letter from its outstretched leg.
She waited until he was seated again and said, “Together?”
“Together,” he agreed, and she tore open the envelope.
His head bent close to hers as they scanned the parchment.
“Gryffindor!” he said triumphantly, and she sat back, smiling a little to herself. Another Gryffindor. She’d have thought… well, she’d thought maybe Ravenclaw, but Gryffindor was just fine, of course. And for a moment, she envied her young son, settling into his dormitory in that familiar old tower, meeting the Fat Lady and being with his sister again. He’d be starting classes the next day, she thought, and she hoped there would be another letter, telling her all he’d seen and letting her remember her own first week at school.
“Knut for your thoughts,” Ron said, after a moment.
She shook her head. “Hmm? Nothing. Just woolgathering.”
“You’re disappointed, aren’t you?” Ron said, goosing her ribs and making her squirm. “You held a secret hope that he’d be in Slytherin.”
She batted him away and put on her swottiest voice. “Well, it would set a good example for my work on fairness and equality, Ronald. Just think, a child of ours in Slytherin.”
He shook his head at her fondly. “You’re too much, ’Mione. Well, I, for one, am happy to think of our children upholding the family traditions.”
“What, sneaking out, making mischief and generally breaking any rules that aren’t set in stone—and a few that are?”
“Exactly,” he said.
She settled into the couch and let her head fall back, lazily flicking her wand to send the leftover food and dirty dishes to the kitchen. Ron made himself comfortable beside her. They sat gazing into the fireplace for some time, the silence spinning out until it was no longer easy and companionable, but just… silent. It was the lack of the children’s noise, she knew, and they would grow accustomed to it in time.
She pondered, not for the first time, how difficult it would be to charm a Muggle television to work in a magical household. She had little interest in it beyond the challenge of making it work, but she felt sure that Ronald would take pleasure in it, and he wasn’t the sort to enjoy reading by the fire as she did. Surely he was going to have to find something to do with his evenings.
She wanted to summon a book, but she didn’t want to offend him.
“What the hell are you going to do with all this time?” he said suddenly.
“Beg pardon?”
“You must be going out of your head,” Ron said, propping himself up on one elbow to peer at her. “I don’t think I’ve seen you just sit down and relax in the thirty years I’ve known you.”
“It’s only been twenty-eight years, thank you very much,” she replied. “And what about you? It’s not as if you’ve been accustomed to a life of leisure.”
“Yes, but I’m looking forward to it,” Ron said. “I’ve thirteen years of sleep to catch up on. Lie-ins on weekends, lazy evenings on the sofa…” Fort, who was curled at their feet, thumped his forked tail against the wooden floor as if in happy acceptance of these new plans. “But I don’t know how you’ll stand it. Maybe you should take a class or something. We wouldn’t want that brain of yours to stagnate.”
“I don’t think my brain is in any danger, Ronald,” she replied, playfully shoving him back to his own spot on the couch. “But I’ll take it under advisement.”
Truthfully, it might be fun to take a class again. Hermione could not remember the last time she’d studied for her own pleasure, rather than for a bit of legislation she was writing or a case she was hearing. Certainly there were disciplines in which she’d gotten a little rusty. And it would help her keep her mind occupied, as he’d said, and not dwell on the absence of the children.
“You wouldn’t be lonely in the evenings?” she said, after a time.
“I think I could spare you for a few hours,” he said wryly.
“I meant that seriously, you know.”
“I know you did. But Hermione,” he said, “you’ve worked night and day for years. Before the kids came along, I wondered if you’d ever leave your office. And then there were stories and bedtimes, and your nightly revision of their work—”
She huffed at him. “Well, I had to keep apprised of what they were learning, didn’t I? And you have to admit that I’m more experienced on the Muggle end of things than you are.”
“I wasn’t criticizing. Just saying that you’ve been caught up in work and the children for a long time. It might be nice for you to do something for yourself.”
“And leave you alone to do what?”
“Do you honestly imagine that I’ll be getting into trouble while you’re gone? Throwing wild parties, maybe, or hiring house-elves?” He laughed. “I’ve got my own routines. And I meant it when I said I’d like to take it easy for a while.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said and rose to make her way to the bedroom.
Ron followed her up the stairs and changed into the blue and white striped pajamas that never failed to remind her of both his father and the ghoul they’d once Transfigured in the attic of the Burrow. It was a distressing combination, but tonight it made her smile. Perhaps their children were following in their footsteps. And they hadn’t been terrible footsteps, had they? There had been a lot of love and loyalty to go around during those years. A lot of daring; a lot of pure, foolhardy, Gryffindor courage.
Hermione carefully hung up her skirt and banished her jumper to the laundry basket. She slipped into the oversized Chudley Cannons tee shirt that she had appropriated from Ron long about 2002 and had been wearing to bed ever since. It was exactly the kind of familiar comfort she needed tonight.
She climbed into bed and twisted her hair up and away from her face as she nestled into her pillows. Ron extinguished the lights, but she lay sleepless in the darkness, thinking over what he’d said. She had expected him to fall directly to sleep, but his quiet, even breathing told her that he was as thoughtful as she was tonight.
At last, she said quietly, “Well, if you’re sure… there are subjects I’d like to brush up on. Mind magics, for one, though I’m not sure there are even classes offered on the subject. But I never felt my Occlumency was quite as strong as I would have liked, and I do think having more experience working with a runic Pensieve could only be beneficial to the collection and verification of depositions and testimony—”
Ron sighed, turning over to face her. “I meant for this to be something you’d enjoy. Not as an extension of your work at the Ministry.”
“But I would enjoy it!” she protested.
“Just… consider doing something for pleasure. If not for yourself, then for my peace of mind.”
She made noise that was half laugh and half sigh and pulled the covers up to her chin.
“For your sake, then,” she said and closed her eyes.