We have an official statement from Mr. Harry Malfoy-Potter, Head of the Auror office:

“Around 5PM yesterday, one of our officers, Mrs. Hermione Krum, was investigating a smuggling operation, and was ambushed by a cell of four people adjacent to the Voldemort regime. She was disarmed and petrified, and her life was in immediate danger. She used wandless magic to neutralise all four assailants, whose remains were dealt with by our officers after she called for assistance, and she is uninjured and is currently recovering from work related stress.”

We also asked Mr. Viktor Krum, a member of the Auror office and her husband, for comment:

Mr Krum, how do you feel about your wife being sent on a dangerous mission? After all, you have two small children?

“My wife is an Auror and my partner at work. She can very much take care of herself, as you have seen, in what was pretty much the worst case scenario: she was alone, she had to investigate a hut that was magically protected from both remote surveillance and apparition, so we couldn’t see what she was getting into, and she couldn’t get away quickly, and she was ambushed, disarmed and petrified before she could even get a spell out. Regardless, all four assailants were neutralised within seconds and she was unharmed. As you can see, it’s the thugs and villains who were at greatest risk here, and honestly, had they not attacked her so aggressively, she could probably handle them in a more survivable manner. This way, they committed suicide by Auror, and as far as I am concerned, good riddance”… “Yes, I can confirm that our sister Lyra has been teaching us both wandless magic”…”Yes, *that* Lyra”.

We also contacted another member of the Auror office who wishes to remain anonymous:

“That scene was the single most disgusting and terrifying thing I have seen in my life. They say the thugs were neutralised, and that’s not actually wrong, but that’s like saying that a Hungarian Horntail is something like a flying iguana, only bigger. It doesn’t portray the full picture. If by neutralised they mean liquified or put through a meat grinder on a very fine setting, then we’re talking. It looked like those four thugs were processed by an industrial-sized food blender. Lady Hermione was unharmed, other than vomiting due to the exposure to the aftermath. To be honest, we should be using visuals from that scene in a ‘crime doesn’t pay’ campaign”…”No, I don’t think it was a case of disproportional use of force. She was assaulted, disarmed and petrified, and she was surrounded by four armed attackers who issued threats about what they were going to do with her next. It is fortunate that she was capable of handling herself or otherwise we would be having a different crime scene, with a dead Auror who just happens to be a young mother, and one of the most competent, brightest witches in the world. I just wish she would have dealt with them in a more contained and less disturbing manner, but that’s a purely aesthetic consideration”.

…

Lyra giggled as Hermione read her the news. “Honestly, I agree with Phinneas here, assuming that was him. I wish you used some less disturbing way of killing villains in the future, because that”, she shivered “That was disgusting”.

“You’ll get no arguments from me”, Hermione hunched into herself. “I kept smelling that for hours after I showered. I used the simplest, most effective method that was easiest to tap into in that condition, but I’m sure I can do better in the future”.

“He’s also right that this will discourage future attempts of the kind, since nobody wants to end up like that, especially after having every kind of advantage over you”, Lyra smiled. “You truly handled yourself wonderfully and I’m proud of you”.

“Thank you”, she smiled at her sister. “There’s more. They are mentioning that all four of us live together and that we are immensely wealthy, and they wonder why we decided to work such a dangerous job when we have enough money that we wouldn’t need to work an hour in our life, and especially something this dangerous and nasty. Harry told them that it’s not a matter of money; we wanted to make sure that the community is safe and all the members of the fallen regime are dealt with, and we thought the best way to prevent losses was to do it ourselves. The journalist concludes that evidence so far speaks in favour of that argument, but asked Harry how he feels about his childhood friend and sister of choice being exposed to mortal danger for the second time in less than two years, and he told them that we had two attacks with nine criminals dead, no collateral damage and no Auror casualties, and he prefers that to having to come to some less deadly Auror’s funeral and having to explain things to their family. He says he’s sorry you and I had to deal with that, but we can obviously take care of ourselves”, she smiled. “He has a talent for handling the public”.

“I truly married well”, Lyra smiled brightly.

She approached the hut carefully. By all accounts, they were dealing with smugglers of stolen goods that got nicked from an import firm warehouse two weeks ago. Smugglers won’t like being caught, so they were considered dangerous. Not truly dangerous, not like that dark alley at night, but dangerous enough for her to test herself in her new job as an Auror.

The babies were over a year old now and were no longer nursing, and Lyra had their breasts magically repaired to their earlier, pre-pregnancy condition. They were smaller, and she was kind of miffed about that because Viktor liked them bigger, but smaller ones were more practical, she told herself. And currently, practical was important.

This should be no different from sneaking into a chicken coop and stealing eggs on a muggle farm, she thought, and I did that before. Only the chickens had wands and reasons to use them. The hut was magically protected against remote viewing, so she couldn’t see what’s waiting for her inside. It was also protected against apparition, but she wouldn’t want to do that in the first place; too risky if you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. Slow and steady wins the race, said the turtle. Hermione smiled.

Non-verbal Alohomora dealt with the lock. It was dark inside, but she had a bad feeling. Hidden humans, more than one. More than three.

“Expelliaramus. Petrificus Totalus.” Two spells hit her and her wand flew away. She couldn’t move, not even her eyes, as she fell to the floor. It was an ambush.

“Jared, look what we caught”, a sneering, filthy figure addressed another. “We got ourselves a pureblood”, he laughed.

“Pure muggle-born delicacy, just for us”, a witch with messy black hair and patched up worn robe replied.

“And the blonde freak holding her leash is nowhere to be found, regrettably”, the third one added in a mocking tone, as lights and sounds of heavenly bells started appearing from what looked like cracks in space.

And then the space itself fragmented where they stood, tore them apart and then sucked them into a swirl and back out again, in liquid form.

The body-bind curse vanished, and Hermione stood straight, and dusted off her robes. “I need immediate assistance, and it’s not going to be pretty”, she tapped her wrist and spoke into the red circle. “I know, you told me so, but I think I will need to puke”, she closed her eyes and covered her nose and mouth with the cloth of her robe. “Where’s my wand? Oh, here. Eek”. She noticed, as she picked up her prop, that it’s covered in blood and other things, and then she actually threw up.

…

“Now you know how I learned not to play with space. I did that to a cow. I threw up all afternoon and couldn’t eat for the next day”, Lyra rubbed her sister’s shoulders as the Auror team cleaned up the mess.

“I will never be as precise and elegant as you”, Hermione hunched slightly. “I used the thing that came easiest, which was to touch magic, feel their presence in it, and just…”

“Shred and crush”, Lyra finished the sentence for her. “I know. Time is harder, but we’ll work on it more”, she nodded.

“I just killed four people and I feel nothing wrong about it. What’s wrong with me?”, Hermione stuttered in shock.

“There’s nothing wrong with you. From what I can see, the deeper layers of the world assisted you and that means they approve. You would only feel wrongness if you used your free will to tear at the magic against the feeling of rightness, and in this case, you killed four horrible people. Another dark cell adjacent to the Voldemort regime, by all accounts. They used petty crime to finance themselves, and that deceived us into thinking it’s all they were”.

“Let’s go home, I need a shower”.

“I bribed Seamus Finnigan to spy on Harry during our first year, you know”, Lyra smiled at Hermione as they finally had some rest and the babies were asleep.

“No way!”, Hermione gasped. “Devious”, she grinned.

“Slytherin”, Lyra grinned back. “I love boys, they are so decent and straightforward. Seamus had a taste for both gossip and expensive things, and he had no money. So, I approached him and offered to solve his luxury problem if he told me things about Harry – his muggle caretakers, his family, what he’s like and so on. Seamus vetted me out; he basically checked what I wanted to know first, making sure I wasn’t trying to find stuff that would hurt Harry. When he concluded that I was vetting out a prospective boyfriend, he was very helpful. Later, when he saw us holding hands and talking, he approached me in passing, whispered ‘good girl’ and smiled”, she laughed. “He later told me he thought it was the most awesome, straightforward thing he ever saw a girl do – basically, check a guy out because I liked him, then when I figured out everything is as it should be, I went for him”.

“Woah”, Hermione looked stunned. “They really do have a bro code. A girl would usually back-stab another girl in a blink of an eye”.

“I considered spying on you, too, but I didn’t dare”, Lyra grinned. “There were plenty of girls who hated you and would gossip, but if I approached them, they would instantly blackmail me and threaten to tell you that I asked, so I didn’t want to touch that nest of vipers with a long pole”, she snickered. “Instead, I listened to the second or third hand gossip in our common room; the Patil sisters were the source, and somebody always heard something”.

“What did they say?”, Hermione couldn’t resist.

“They hated you for just reading books, not caring about dresses or makeup, not wanting to gossip ‘because you think you’re better than they’, and trying to figure out whether you have any romantic interests or you’re only about grades”, Lyra remembered. “Honestly, hearing them made me want to be your friend even harder, because I was also into old books and I imagined what it would be like to talk to you, compare what we’ve read, get ideas about things I didn’t already hear of, or recommend books I’ve read or saw. I also dreamed of teaching you my cosmetics routine, because I knew you think it’s a terrible waste of time, but I learned it’s important to look good”.

“It’s not a waste of time, now that it means talking to you for hours, and you’re a huge girl-shaped library”, Hermione giggled. “But if I imagine just sitting there with that giggly bunch for hours dressing up, my brain seizes”.

“I know. I tried to filter them out as much as possible, but if you antagonise them too hard, it gets worse. I played the role of a haughty princess who is above those things but I always tried to look good so they had nothing to talk about, and also I may have hinted that those caught gossiping me will be buried in the forbidden forest in a dark hour of the night”, she made a convincing impression of a villain.

Hermione snickered. “I wish I tried that. I just hexed a few of them and after that they avoided me because I was very good at magic, and I also had a hot temper”.

“I was yearning and longing, basically. I wanted to be together with Harry, and I wanted to be your friend so much. I knew there’s a smart girl with a huge overlap in interests with me that I wanted to talk to, and yet all that ideology taught me that you’re a danger to our community and I didn’t know enough to disprove it and apologize to you for insults and stupid stuff. I felt as if I’m causing my own problems but I didn’t know how to do anything constructive about it”.

“All of us had a complicated mess to deal with”, Hermione acknowledged. “Even worse than what you have to deal with when you’re doing my hair”, she smiled.

“About that…” She closed her eyes, and Hermione’s hair glowed with magic.

“There we go. Washed, conditioned, dried and braided”, Lyra smiled. “Sorry for not doing it by hand. It’s more fun but I’m afraid the babies aren’t going to give us enough time”, she listened as a baby was fussing in the nursery. “Yup, that was bound to happen”, she nodded.

“I love you doing my hair”, Hermione hugged her. “Ow. Let’s go feed them, my breasts are so full of milk they hurt already”.

“Same”, Lyra nodded, taking her sister’s hand.

“If I hadn’t been on your mother’s list, would you even notice me?”, he smiled as he brought them breakfast while she sat there in the living room, nursing Lucia.

“I can’t imagine you not being on that list, but let’s entertain the thought for a while”, she smiled back as she took a sandwich. “You were too obviously impressive to ever fade into the background, so I would have noticed you for sure. I would have watched you. But if you weren’t on the list, I wouldn’t feel that I had already been allowed to fall for you. I’d probably ask my mother about you, ask why you weren’t on the list. Depending on what she told me, I would probably feel either guilty or conflicted or relieved, but I trusted my mother’s opinion implicitly, and I felt she knows best what is good for me. One of the main reasons why I felt so comfortable choosing you at the age of eleven was that she pre-approved you. You were the number one name on my list – the prince of the wizarding world. Ancient, highly respectable family, famous and respected parents, enormous family wealth, and she did mention that your mother was a muggle-born, but she shrugged it off because Lily Evans was a generational talent, and we knew there was a prophecy of some kind marking you personally as the one who will have the power to vanquish the Dark Lord, making you an obvious and most desirable choice for her daughter to marry”, she finished.

“Didn’t she mind that my parents were Voldemort’s enemies and there was a prophecy about me being meant to fight him?”, Harry wondered, as he sipped his morning coffee.

“The current political divide meant very little to her. She was about tradition, family, personal virtue, magical power and so on. People shift sides, but the inherent quality of a person is what matters. So, she told me all that about you, and she told me the same history about Neville and his parents, as well as few others. I was well briefed, to the point where I knew that Lily was in the Slug Club and I knew how well James did at Quidditch, and what Neville’s parents liked to eat for breakfast at school. Mom was very thorough, and I’m afraid I had an unfair advantage over you, and I felt I knew you already even before I introduced myself, and, being a stupid kid, I tried to impress you in all the wrong ways and put my foot in my mouth, and you know the rest”, she smiled.

“Yes, you hinted that Ron’s family isn’t really great, and you looked at Hermione as if she weren’t even human, and I looked at that and sorted you in the same group with all the other nasty bullies I knew before. I looked at your noble bearing, interpreted it as haughtiness, saw your pristine, fancy clothes and decided you’re a nasty, spoiled little shit that gets a kick out of offending the ‘lesser people’, and thought you’re the worst person I met so far in the wizarding world”, he laughed quietly, as not to disturb the baby. “I wonder, what did that feel like from your side of things?”

“I was furious and humiliated. I tried to hint that the two of us belong together on a higher plane of things, and you told me very clearly that you think I’m a terrible person unworthy of your company. I had no luxury of thinking something like ‘who are you to talk to me like that’, because my mom already told me who you are. You’re the most important boy in the world. You’re the number one name on my list. You’re the boy my mom spoke of with reverence. Who you were was not something I could use to fix my wounded pride, so I was forced to admit that I messed up. Something I did disqualified me in your eyes, and I didn’t know what it was. I started observing, and soon saw that you are very egalitarian, which confused me because I was taught to always perceive a hierarchy – of family reputation and wealth, and of personal worth and achievement, and to try to be at the top, and associate with others who are at the top, because anything else would be degrading. It was not something I thought about – merely implicit things I picked up from my parents, the way you had all sorts of implicit things you picked up from everywhere. What I didn’t understand was that you thought of yourself as belonging to the lowest, downtrodden class of people who are always picked on by those more powerful and wealthy. I couldn’t understand it, because my mom told me that only the Malfoy, Lestrange and Black families are wealthier than you, as the sole heir of the Potter and Peverell lines, and trust me, none of the above would pick on you, since you would be perceived as belonging to the top echelon of our society. You saw how my parents tried to be polite with you in the beginning”.

“And I treated them coldly and outright refused to have anything to do with them because I felt they are the enemy”, he nodded.

“Exactly”, she sipped tea. “You annoyed them, and they thought you to be an insolent brat without manners, and I couldn’t disagree”, she gave him a lopsided smile.

“You were right, I did lack manners and sophistication. I was raised by the Dursleys who didn’t teach me anything, except that I’m worthless in their eyes. Honestly, I wonder how I even learned to speak before Muggle school, where I learned to read and write”, he shrugged.

“That was something so unimaginable to me, that it would never have crossed my mind. I did learn about it, from all sorts of gossip and people I paid money to spy on you”, she winked.

“You paid people to spy on me?”, he was aghast.

“Well, I tried approaching you to talk to you directly, but you would give me that look and just ignore me like I was a thing that got in the way”, she smiled. “So, of course I bribed people”.

“Whom did you bribe?”, Harry was both stunned and amused, because he realised he had no idea.

“I approached a few. Tried Neville Longbottom, but he was so insecure and confused, he didn’t actually talk much to anyone and didn’t know anything, but he was also on my list so I used the opportunity to check him out thoroughly, and decided he’s completely not my type. Then I tried Dean Thomas, but he coldly rejected the idea and told me to go mind my own business, as if somehow you were not my business”, she giggled. “Then I tried Seamus Finnigan, and here I struck gold. His affinity for fancy stuff exceeded his funds, and his affinity for gossip exceeded that of most girls. Let’s just say I got good value for my money”, she looked at her husband mischievously while gently stroking her baby’s head.

“Seamus, you rat”, Harry giggled. “What did he tell you?”

“Well, you would tell things to Ron, and Ron would tell things to everyone, you know how that was. Seamus told me that you didn’t even know about the wizarding world or being a wizard before getting the owl from school, and that the Dursleys even tried to prevent you from receiving the notice so Hagrid had to intervene personally, and that was the first time you ever saw a real wizard. He told me that you didn’t know your parents, didn’t know you were a wizard, didn’t know you were wealthy until Hagrid took you to Gringotts to get money for school gear from your vault, and so on. I was completely shocked at first and couldn’t accept it, but Seamus told it in a completely straightforward way, and I saw you wearing those horrid rags that didn’t make any sense to me before, so I had to accept something that would never make any sense otherwise – you actually thought you were a low-class person, so you associated with others you thought were also low-class, and defended them against a high-class bully, who just happened to be me”, she smiled, with a bitter note of the memory. “My heart went out to you when I realised. I would never have thought that someone who was my equal or superior in social standing could be abused and mistreated like you were, and it felt like a terrible injustice. That night in bed I thought what it would feel like if my parents were killed while I was a baby and I never knew them, and I was raised by nasty people who hated me and neglected me in every way, and I cried”, a tear went down her face. “Something changed in me that night. I stopped taking what I had for granted, because if someone like you could face such fate, it means I could as well, and I think I made my first steps toward adulthood then and there”, she wiped her tears off. “It’s good that I did, because I remembered it when Voldemort came back and degraded my family in our own home, and I remembered what you had to go through with the Dursleys, and felt more connected to you than ever, but of course, you weren’t mine to be connected to back then”, she sighed. “But it’s good that I already adjusted to the thought that something like that could happen to someone like me, so I could emotionally survive it”.

“So, after talking to Seamus, I continued watching you, but with a much changed perspective. I saw how openly friendly you were with people you considered worthy of friendship, and I was sad that I was excluded from that and seen as unworthy. It hurt, a lot. I wished I could just join you, Ron and Hermione at the table and start talking, but I knew you would just stare at me coldly and either leave or wait for me to get the hint and move on. For the first time in my life, I was made to feel like a lesser, unworthy person, which both felt completely unjust, but also earned by my stupid and nasty actions in the beginning, and I started to understand how others would feel when I would dismiss them as people of lower status unworthy of my attention. It softened me, changed me, and it was painful. I continued watching you, especially when you would sneak out, but your invisibility cloak made it hard for you to be seen or caught, so I got caught more than you did and it was so embarrassing. Can you even imagine how embarrassing it was for a girl to get caught sneaking out after a boy?”, she grinned.

“I thought you wanted to get us in trouble”, Harry smiled.

“Well, that’s was my valid excuse – Potter and his gang were up to something and breaking the rules and I wanted to get them in trouble. But you know what they say, there’s always a valid reason and the actual reason, and the actual reason was that I wanted to know what you were doing and see you in action, learn more about what kind of a person you are. That’s why I wanted to play Quidditch against you, too – it gave me an excuse to get physical with you”, she blushed.

“You mean, to throw me off of my broom and plough me into the ground?”, he started laughing, and then put his hand over his mouth as the baby stirred.

“Exactly. Also, have you bump into me and have me bang into a crossbeam”, she snickered. “It wasn’t the kind of physical contact I desired, but I took what I could get, I guess”.

“At some point, I realised that I didn’t even think about other names on my list for months. My list was you. And then I made my decision. It’s going to be only you, ever. Of course, you will have to ask, but my ‘yes’ was a given at that point. I said ‘yes’ at eleven, to the question you asked half an hour after you killed Voldemort”, she beamed at her husband.

“How did I manage to miss all this?”, he massaged his forehead.

“I wasn’t actually loud about it”, she grinned. “You know how girls are. My pride would not allow me to do anything about it, other than greet you in passing and have you sneer at me maliciously, and cry in bed that night. Also, it’s a weird and awkward time for girls – in our dormitory it was all about who got her first period, and the rest of us who didn’t were anxious and thinking whether something was wrong with us. Also, whose boobs started growing, whose figure already started looking more feminine and so on”.

“We boys never even thought about it”, he acknowledged. “At that time I didn’t even understand why boys and girls have separate dormitories”.

“I figured”, she snickered. “Boys always pretend as if periods and other female stuff doesn’t happen, and girls try really hard to keep it discreet so that they hopefully never have the opportunity to find out. At some point, it becomes a monthly routine, but at eleven to thirteen, it’s a whole circus of ‘is there something wrong with me because I didn’t get it yet’ in the girls’ dormitory. We absolutely wouldn’t want boys anywhere near that, because it was too embarrassing”.

“When did you get it?”, he was curious.

“First year, when we played Quidditch. In the air”, she blushed. “I felt something weird, but it was only later in the bathroom that I saw blood on my underwear. I completely freaked out; I thought I was injured by the broom somehow, but then I remembered the cushioning charms, so that couldn’t be it, and also nothing hurt. Then I remembered what mom explained before I went to school, what to expect, and to always wear a pad for safety. I didn’t understand most of it, but you can rest assured I wore a pad for safety since then”, she grinned.

“I can understand why you worshipped your parents”, Harry nodded. “I can’t even imagine going through something like that with the Dursleys, if I happened to be a girl. They taught me nothing and just sneered at me”.

“I know, which is why I had such tolerance for your sneering treatment of me, for two years”, she frowned. “I knew who raised you and how, and that you didn’t know better, but at some point I was so completely done with it and so profoundly humiliated, that I would literally rather have you kill me and be done with it, than suffer it for a minute longer”.

“Thank heavens you did that, because I was too stupid and stubborn and set in my ways to ever snap out of it on my own”, he kissed her. “When I did snap out of it, I felt really embarrassed for treating you badly, and surprised to find out that you’re actually a human person with feelings. I know, it sounds insane”.

“It does, but I guess people aren’t really rational beings”, she mused. “We don’t revise our opinions logically; we just stick with what we think we know until something shocks us into a new reality. I, for instance, stuck with what I thought I knew until I saw Voldemort in person, and his evil shocked me into accepting what you kept telling me for years, and what I kept rationalising around. Only after the new reality becomes emotionally inevitable do we change our minds, because reason is a servant to our emotions, always”. Lucia was done with her meal so she put her on her shoulder to burp.

“Do you think he killed that poor owl in such a horrible way on purpose?”, Lyra brought them all fresh cocoa to calm them down before sleep, and looked at her husband.

He gave it a thought. “No, I don’t think so. It’s just that he had a habit of locking Pig up in the closet to get him out of the way, because he hated having to take care of either animals or people, and he did it on the day when we had to escape, forgot about it completely, and never remembered it because he didn’t actually care about him so he missed nothing”, Harry looked into his wife’s eyes. “I don’t know if it makes it any better”.

“Hardly”, Hermione was furious. “The only reason he would remember his parents was if the dinner didn’t come on time. I could have been absent for days and he wouldn’t remember me if he didn’t need something from me. If I had been crying, Harry would look at me once and immediately understand that something is wrong, we would exchange looks and he would already have a pretty good idea what it could be. Ron would either never notice, or he’d see that my eyes are puffy and ask what’s wrong with them. Had he killed Pig with Avada Kedavra, that would be better because it would at least show that he cared enough about him to kill him on purpose. But no, he killed him by pure neglect, by not caring whether he lived or died. That’s how he made me feel – he didn’t care whether I lived or died, as long as he didn’t miss something he needed from me. I hate him”, she fumed. “You know what else I hate? How he read that book with advice on how to talk to women, how to pay attention and compliment them and so on, and he learned how to fake attentiveness and I was enough of a fool to think that he had changed, that he finally started caring, while he was just running it by a playbook”.

“I’m trying to remember all the situations where I forgot about someone, and hurt their feelings, or even exposed them to danger that way. That happened. I am not without blame. I would have something ‘important’ on my mind, and forget about someone completely. It would hurt them, and I would feel miserable about it later”, Harry reminisced.

“It happens to everyone”, Lyra rubbed his shoulder. “We are all human. We make mistakes, we hurt people either by stupidity or by omission or because we are being obstinate while being in the wrong. But feeling horrible about it later, I think, is what makes a difference between making a mistake and being a psychopath”.

“Ron never felt bad about anything he did. He would feel bad if he felt something affected him adversely, but if he hurt my feelings, he would find it funny, until it started affecting him”, Hermione was still tense and furious.

“Am I a bad person because I’m glad he was such a pig?”, Viktor started sheepishly. “I mean, if he were a slightly better person, Hermione might have gone through with marrying him. I’m very glad she broke up with him, and conditio sine qua non of that is that he was a pig”.

Lyra nodded approvingly and smiled at his Latin.

“You’re a great person and I love you”, Hermione was already in a better mood. “Yes, it helped that he was a dragon-sized pig. That name suits him, and not the poor fluffy owl”.

“Are we still going through some phase of grief?”, Harry scratched his neck.

“Probably, but I don’t know what it’s called. Probably being angry because we are actually starting to accept reality of what he was and we’re annoyed at ourselves for not seeing it sooner”, Hermione smiled at him.

“I’ll tell you what it’s called”, Lyra smiled at them. “It’s called ‘good night everybody’ phase because my brain died half an hour ago and I’m going to crawl into bed and sleep for twelve hours, or until babies start crying, whichever comes first”.

“You’re wise and great and you know what’s good for us”, Hermione laughed. “Lead the way, because we’re done here”.