“We brought a little something for you”, Lyra smiled as she and Hermione unloaded two picnic baskets with wine, cheese, ham and fresh bread. “It’s small payback for feeding everybody since forever, but we had to start somewhere”.

Molly and Arthur stood in shock, because that wasn’t how things usually worked. “Ah. Oh. Thank you”, Molly smiled. “Please, sit down, make yourselves comfortable”, she managed.

“I guessed Ginny would be hanging out with her boyfriend and George would be busy and we didn’t want you to be alone now”, Lyra smiled at them warmly.

“The home does feel so empty now”, Molly whispered.

“That’s why we’re here”, Hermione came to hug the motherly woman.

…

“Anyway, does anyone know why Gamp’s law of elemental transfiguration has exceptions in the first place? I always wondered about that, lacking money and having to figure out food and housing and all that. I though you might know”, Arthur looked at the two young women.

“I’m afraid I don’t know”, Hermione shrugged. “I can tell you what they are, being a nerd and all, but I don’t know why”.

“I do”, Lyra whispered.

Everybody looked at her. “I thought nobody knows”, Hermione started.

“It’s because we refuse to live in a world where nothing matters”, she looked at her friends with those beautiful silver eyes that looked like two stars. “Or we are made by someone who refuses to have nothing matter. Pick either”, she smiled. “We refuse to accept a prize without a contest. If something is not deserved, we refuse to value it. If we value it, we want it to be precious, we want it to come as a result of a battle won, of choices well made”. She looked at Arthur. “If we can just wave a wand and produce gold, why would anyone accept it as payment for anything? If we can produce food and shelter, why would money be precious? If we want something other people have, what could we offer them as compensation?” She turned to Hermione. “And your list of exceptions is incomplete”, she smiled. “We also can’t raise people from the dead. We can’t replace body parts lost in battle with evil. We can’t produce children magically. We can’t cause true love magically – only a mockery of it. Loss needs to be real. Sacrifice needs to matter.” She kissed her friend’s hand. “Love needs to be earned”.

“Woah”, she rose up as she saw a dusty tome in the library. “You have it as well”. She picked up Annales by Tacitus. “My father used to read it to me before bed time”.

“You speak Latin?”, Hermione managed to gather her bearings.

“Latine expedite loquor, quod pater meus me ab aetate duorum annorum docuit”, Lyra smiled. “I speak fluent Latin, thanks to my father teaching me since I was two”, she translated.

They all looked at her with their mouths open. “My grandmother gave me this book, but nobody could ever read it since we didn’t know the language”, Molly managed.

“He would also read me from Cicero, Vitruvius and Plutarch”, Lyra’s eyes were soft with memory. “I especially liked the stories about Alexander’s conquest of India, and how they mocked Nero”.

“It is no wonder you were always so loyal to your parents”, Arthur mused. “I misunderstood. I always imagined you being united by common contempt and hatred of lesser families and lesser humans”, he grinned. “It would never occur to me that Lucius was a loving father who would read to his little girl in Latin”.

“He was, and I adored him”, Lyra smiled. “It was a hard blow when I found out that he could be wrong, and in such a grave matter. I think I grew up then, ceased to be a child and became a grown woman, who had to make her own choices and carve her own path. But I repaid them for their love, Arthur. I could have escaped that horrible dungeon at any moment. The price would be their death or terrible torture, so I stayed there to protect them, and I knew that I couldn’t defend myself or protect myself properly because it would expose them to repercussions. Terrible things kept crossing my mind – things like having to silently accept being gifted to some villain as a trophy, be raped in my own bed and not make a sound, because they would be punished for my disobedience. I am incredibly grateful to all of you who fought for us on the outside and won our freedom, and to God or fate or whatever for sparing me the worst of consequences. I am grateful to you, Molly, for killing aunt Bella for me, despite it being my job”, she looked at her with deep serenity and seriousness.

“We didn’t know”, Molly looked horrified. “We couldn’t even imagine what you had to endure”.

“Oh, we could; we just didn’t bother”, Arthur was repentant. “We didn’t see Death Eaters or anybody else on the other side as actual people, and we didn’t bother thinking about their children either. It would get in the way of business”, he sighed remorsefully.

“I didn’t say it to make you feel guilty, Arthur”, Lyra smiled. “I wanted to let you know that I repaid my parents for all the love and kindness they showed me in my childhood by enduring hell in order to save and protect them. I did it because I wanted to remind you that you, like my parents, gave everything to your children, and yet, I fail to remember Ron ever reciprocating. He consumed your love, care, shelter, food and other things you could barely afford, and he thought he repaid you by coming for more. In the end, he repaid you by becoming a terrible person and putting a stain on your family name. What I am saying is: please, don’t feel guilty. Your problem isn’t that you didn’t give enough; it’s that you received too little in return, and you ended up depleted. Will you allow us to love you, and take care of you, in his stead?”, Lyra looked at them pleadingly, with the eyes of a goddess, as they both burst into tears and came to embrace her.

…

“You learned Latin since you were two”, Hermione looked at her, as they were back home on their couch.

“Yes”, Lyra smiled. “Surprised?”

“Actually, no. I’m in awe”, she smiled as she massaged Lyra’s feet. “At two, I was proud of myself for speaking full sentences in English”.

“I wish we were born as sisters. We both seem to have been lonely little nerds”, Lyra laughed.

“True, but at least we now seem to be making up for lost time”, Hermione giggled.

“How did you turn out so normal? I was in that place for only a few hours and I was at my limits. If that lasted for days, let alone years, I’d have gone insane”, Hermione rested after their practice session. The children were so exhausted from running and jumping at the floating lights that they fell asleep on the floor, and they had a peaceful moment now.

“I believe you, but you were actively tortured by aunt Bella, in the same way she mentally damaged Alice and Frank Longbottom to the point where they are permanently in St. Mungo’s and unaware of the world around them. I was at no point the target of their focused attention in that way, which was fortunate for me”, Lyra pointed out.

“But still; you’re so incredibly sorted out that you’re basically healing everybody and providing comfort, rather than being broken and in need of healing yourself. How did you even manage that?”

Lyra thought about it. “It was horrible. I still feel cold terror and start sweating when I visit that house. It is full of terrible memories for me. I wouldn’t look nearly as sorted out if I had to live there”, she smiled. “But to me, the actual terror was of a different kind. It started when Voldemort returned, I saw what a horrible person he was, I understood that my parents were wrong about him, and I returned to school to tell Harry, only to find him flirting with another girl”, she shrunk into herself a bit. “I understand now that I assumed all sort of things about our relationship he had no idea about, so he didn’t understand how that would affect me, but from my perspective… my life was over. I chose him when I was eleven. It could be only him. He looked at me with suspicion and fear thinking I sided with Voldemort now that he’s back, and he kissed another girl; he never kissed me like that. When I gave him a hateful look because he betrayed me, he took it as a confirmation, because argumentum ad Voldemort always seemed to hang between us”, she smiled, and wiped a tear off Hermione’s cheek. “For two years things were broken between us to the point where he ended up almost killing me”, she continued. “Those two years were the darkest in my life; I had Voldemort and his minions in my home, and they contributed to my despair and terror, but after Harry realised he loved me – and by the way I will be eternally in your debt for your role in this – and he told me he’s mine if I wanted him, it was as if a sun lit up in my heart again and I was whole, and I felt my life returning, I felt I had something to hope for, other than merely trying to keep my parents alive and surviving for their sake. My chosen life was back on track. I might not die as an old maid after all”, they both laughed through tears. “I was still terrified at home, but it was all external now, not terror feeding my inner despair and hopelessness. I understood what truly mattered, what I had to protect at all cost, and what I merely had to endure”, Lyra smiled like a small sun.

“So that’s what you meant by ‘nobody hurts what is mine’, after you wiped out those thugs”, Hermione realised.

“Yes”, Lyra nodded. “I realised that life isn’t time, or place, or things. It’s the people you love. Life is when you spend quality time with them, and everything else is just scenery and energy to power it. At the time I came to that realisation, my life were my parents and Harry. When my parents had a change of heart and allegiance about Voldemort, and Harry understood he loved me, the two parts of my life that tried to tear me apart came together to heal me. Voldemort, werewolves, death eaters – they were just scenery. Sure, they were the scenery of a Lovecraftian horror, and they still threatened everything I loved, but after my heart was healed, it was just an external threat. It was manageable. I still shivered in fear every time I had to pass through a dark corridor in my own home, and I would wake up screaming in terror from nightmares I had about what would happen if it came to the worst, and the absolute worst were those five minutes when Hagrid brought Harry from the woods, as dead. How I even survived that, I will never know. I was in a daze even when he stopped pretending to be dead and woke up properly only when Voldemort was dead. Then I realised that I lived life conditionally, until that moment. I expected us to die together more than I expected us to live together. I didn’t mind, as long as the ‘together’ part was there”, she smiled, and wiped both their tears now. “After all, I didn’t know if Voldemort could be defeated at all, now that Dumbledore was dead. I hoped, but it was a weak hope, easily defeated by reason. And then we went to talk, we both apologized for our respective roles in our misfortune, and he asked me to marry him, and I said yes”, she beamed. “From that point on, my soul was so thoroughly and profoundly healed, that nothing really bothers me, unless it threatens the people I love, but as you could see, I practiced magic a lot in case that happened”, she grinned. “And there was another thing that felt like deep healing: when I surrendered my virginity to Harry in our first night together after the wedding, and I felt such relief and happiness that it got to be him, and not some filthy creep Voldemort gifted me to, or that accursed werewolf raping me as prelude to eating me alive”, she shivered. “That fear was with me for years, and only at that point it felt finally resolved, and I got to live my life as I chose it”, her smile came back.

Hermione just hugged her, because there were no words.

“You know what I thought was the most frightening spell in the world, during those horrible three years of having Voldemort, death eaters and werewolves in my home?”, Lyra sat on the couch, hugging her knees.

“I’m afraid, with those people, the list would be extensive”, Viktor frowned, and Harry and Hermione seemed to agree.

“Expelliaramus”, Lyra whispered.

They all looked at each other, not understanding.

“Oh, it’s quite simple, in fact”, she nodded. “And it’s the reason Harry uses it in duels. Once you remove a wizard’s wand, the next spell can be whatever you want, and you can even take your time, because you’re no longer dealing with a wizard, you’re dealing with a muggle”, she explained. “Once the wand is out of your hand, the duel is over. The fight is over. Your bodily autonomy is over. Your life is over. My greatest fear was being disarmed from an ambush, being rendered helpless, and then having someone… take their time with me”, she shivered. “They were already making suggestions out loud. I didn’t even have to use my imagination”.

The rest of them felt as if the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. “Oh”.

“And you gave me your wand”, Harry whispered.

“Yes”, she smiled. “I did get some other wand, that didn’t like working for me very much, and then I thought, this is hardly better than having no wand at all, so why not try that”.

“How long did it take you to get it to work?”, Hermione wondered.

“Not long. Days. What actually helped is that the new wand processed everything with a delay and a reluctance, and I could feel individual steps being taken, now my command is being translated into the magical layer of the world, what it ends up being… and then I stopped telling it to the wand, and started telling it to the world itself”, she explained. “With my old wand, it would actually be much harder, with how eager it was to obey me”.

“Those must have been a terrible few days”, Viktor rubbed his chin. “Having a disobedient wand, not yet figuring out how to do it wandlessly, and all those horrible people roaming about”.

“One would think, but actually it gave me something else to think about, and they also had other things to think about, with Harry, Hermione and Ron breaking into Gringotts about that time. Nobody was giving me any thought”, she smiled. “And once I got it, I very quickly advanced from the basics to replicating everything I could do with a wand”.

“Also, a wand limits you to what you’re pointing at. When those five thugs surrounded me, my first thought was that I can’t deal with more than two of them in time the others will get me. From what I could see, wandlessly you just dealt with them all at once”, Hermione noted. “You need to teach me this”, she hugged her friend. “It makes me feel exposed to be the only one not to know it”.

“Well, technically, nobody knew it before Lyra figured it out, and you didn’t miss it then”, her husband pointed out.

“That’s true, but now that all of you know it, I feel I need to learn it quickly”, Hermione managed a weak smile.

“Tomorrow after breakfast”, Lyra nodded. “We’re all too tired now. Also, keep in mind that it’s more dangerous than using a wand. You put your wand away when you don’t mean to use it. You are also deliberate about where you point it. You can’t put your mind away when you’re not using it, and once you get accustomed to binding it to magic directly, you can’t allow your mind to wander aimlessly, or think too hard about something because you will make it happen”, she pointed out.

An orange levitated, peeled itself, separated into slices, the slices transformed into roses, assembled themselves into a bouquet, and fell into Hermione’s lap.

“Point taken”, Hermione giggled.

“Also, avoid messing with space geometry. That’s probably the easiest way to get yourself killed by accident”. She pointed in the air, and space suddenly looked like a cracked mirror, one shard showing Hogwarts main hall, the other Slytherin girls’ dormitory, another their office in the Ministry, and the final one showed Diagon Alley. She closed her eyes and the space healed.

The others looked at her with mouths agape. “Scary girl”, Harry smiled.

“What made you change your mind?”, Lyra asked her mother.

“It didn’t happen all at once”, Narcissa admitted. “The pureblood ideology was in my family for centuries before the Dark Lord. It was something that was just … true. But I think, when I saw the Dark Lord murder that poor, innocent woman that taught muggle studies at Hogwarts, Charity Burbage, and he did it in our home, in our drawing room, with all those gleeful monsters watching him feed her body to that accursed snake of his, something in me changed.”

“That was a terrible sight”, a shiver passed through Harry’s body. Narcissa looked at him, surprised. “You watched?”

“To my great misfortune, yes. I had visions through my scar. Terrible nightmares. This was one of them. I woke up in cold sweat with a terrible headache”, he reminisced.

“I woke up in cold sweat with terrible headache many following mornings, thanks to that memory”, she shivered. “This was such a terrible crime, that nothing could justify it. And it was done in such a terribly inhuman way, and the reactions of the monsters present were so vile and cruel, that a full realisation dawned upon me: we invited this horror into our home, and the only way for us to have any chance for a future of any kind is for the other side to win decisively”.

“But that’s merely the obvious part, the part about the Dark Lord”, Lucius interjected. “If only for that, we would be likely still espousing the same pureblood beliefs, because it was obvious that the Dark Lord espoused those beliefs only to deceive us and recruit us for his cause. But no – we saw again and again how the supposed purebloods acted as the vilest beasts without honour, grace, manners, dignity, purity or love in their hearts. I know you must have thought of us as cold, arrogant aristocrats, Harry, but beneath that public mask we loved our family dearly, and it terrified us that neither Voldemort nor his followers seemed to care about love in any way. They were only about murder, fear and service to the Dark Lord, and I am not sure they would ever have stopped killing and torturing people had you not ended it, for which we shall forever be in your debt”, Lucius looked at Harry with complete sincerity in his silver eyes, that were so much like Lyra’s.

Narcissa nodded. “We would look at each other, and try to imagine the end goal of all that, and all we could think of was a frightening, cold, evil nightmare with no end. And those supposed purebloods all felt like scum, villains, murderers and were barely human, if at all. When we compared them with that kind, good woman they murdered in our home, we understood that we would rather have her in our home than them, any time. We watched the people from the Order of Phoenix here and there, and it would break our hearts to see their love and kindness towards each other, something we haven’t properly felt since the Dark Lord took residence in our home and made it into a den of most the despicable villainy. We saw Harry and Lady Hermione, and they felt like proper people, not empty husks filled with dark evil, such as we kept seeing in our home. And somewhere, I don’t even know when exactly, it dawned upon us that purity of blood isn’t something you inherit; it must be something you manifest and live”, the lady sighed.

“And it helped when our daughter denounced us as blood traitors for having only one child, and then exposing her to those horrors and putting her life in danger. I never felt such shame in my life as when I watched her speak, and it was good for me because it woke me from my stupor and I couldn’t find anything untrue in it. I betrayed my blood and my heritage, as well as blood and heritage of my wife’s family, by preaching pureblood supremacy while not having more pureblood children to actually put my actions in alignment with my words, and I sided with a monster who considered gifting my daughter to some vile scum who served him the best in his evil. I was horrified at myself, and as I listened to my daughter’s words, I saw that everything she is saying is true”, Lucius looked at Lyra, who blushed.

“And when we saw how you and Harry honoured our family name and heritage, how wonderfully and respectfully your treated my childhood home, we decided to put our entire weight behind you without reservations. Not only have Harry and Hermione saved us all, but they also embraced our daughter as an equal and jointly formulated post-war policy with her, in such a balanced and reasonable way, that we would never have dared to hope for it. Where we feared you would tear down tradition, you preserved it, and only removed things that seem to have caused all this mischief in the first place”, Narcissa smiled at them.

“Did it not offend you that people like myself are now considered purebloods?”, Hermione asked shyly.

“Not at all”, Lucius was adamant. “Seeing you in our home, when you were brought in as prisoners, in contrast with the vile creatures that imprisoned us in our own home, made us revise everything we thought we knew about purity. I don’t know whether our daughter told you what we taught her?”, he looked at Harry and Hermione.

“I have a pretty good idea; we talked a lot, at school. She told me that to her, purity is a state of character – truthfulness, dignity, knowledge of tradition and history, respect for your ancestry, love for your parents, love for other pureblood wizards, strength of the community, and so on. I was very much surprised, because her beliefs seemed unique. Other Slytherins seemed to think it’s only about your parentage”, Harry nodded.

“Yes”, Lucius nodded. “That’s what we taught her and that’s how we acted within the confines of our home. So, when we saw you and Lady Hermione, you both looked like the embodiments of the principles of pureblood wizardry that we believed in, while the Dark Lord and his followers looked, to be honest, exactly like we imagined the mudbloods would look – no class, no honour, no love, no dignity, no respect, no love for their fellow wizards. So, accepting Lady Hermione as a pureblood witch was not just easy; it was the most natural conclusion of everything we saw. And seeing how wonderfully you arranged your household: preserving the tradition while removing the darkness, loving and respecting each other, bringing magic to hitherto unseen heights, increasing family wealth, supporting the community while dealing with threats decisively, we feel that our family heritage is in the right hands”, he bowed to all three of them. “Also, Arthur and Molly Weasley visited us this morning, and I honestly never believed I would witness anything of the sort. They sincerely apologised to us for judging us harshly and not taking our advice when it would have benefited them greatly. We were wordless, I admit. Truly, I believe you are ushering in a new era, and you are doing it both decisively and with tact and wisdom”.

“May I see Kreacher?”, Narcissa looked at Lyra, pleading, and her daughter smiled and nodded. Crack.

“Yes, Young Mistress? Mistress Cissa?”, he was surprised. “Kreacher is very happy to see you”, he bowed.

“Hello Kreacher”, Narcissa smiled softly. “Are you doing well?”

“Kreacher is very happy, happier than he had ever been in his long life”, he croaked. “Kreacher is family”.

Narcissa wiped a tear from her cheek. “I am sorry we didn’t treat you better before”, she sobbed. “I didn’t know better”.

“Mistress Cissa was always kind to old Kreacher. She has nothing to apologise for”, he touched her hand respectfully and disapparated, as Narcissa was struggling with tears.

“You took our family tradition, poured love and respect into it, and transformed it into something that makes me so proud of you”, she whispered.

“We buried the heads of the deceased house elves in the Black family crypt with full honours due to the members of the family”, Harry spoke. “And the portrait of the old Mistress as well, so she can now yell insults at her fellow dead”, he smiled.

“Truly, the place is improved by it immensely”, Narcissa smiled at him through her tears. “And I’m sorry I thought of you as an insolent boy before. You are wise, reasonable, balanced and respectful. Our previous discord was fully my own fault”.

“I understand”, he nodded. “And most, if not all, of any wisdom that I may possess, is due to your daughter’s beneficial influence”, he smiled at both her and Lyra, who squirmed with embarrassment.

“Liar”, she whispered.