“What’s a black hole?”, Lyra asked sheepishly while sipping her tea.

“Oh, it’s a term from astrophysics, designating an object so massive, it’s orbital velocity is the speed of light in vacuum”, Hermione explained. “Muggles did quite some advancements in philosophy of the natural world, as you would know it, having read ‘Principia’ in its original language”.

“And astrophysics is… let me guess, nature of the stars, if I translate directly from Greek?”, Lyra rubbed her chin.

“Close enough”, Hermione nodded. “Physics is the word they use for what used to be known as philosophia naturalis, or philosophy of the physical world, which was abbreviated to physics. Astrophysics is a term invented rather recently, but your library kind of doesn’t have anything since the establishment of the Statute of Secrecy, so I guess Newton’s ‘Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica’ counts as one of the most recent works of our joint civilization”.

“I mean, I know some of it – how the light breaks from white into a spectrum, and I can infer that the orbital velocity is the velocity at which speed of the object follows curvature of the Earth, or another celestial body, so that it keeps falling in perpetuity without hitting the ground. I don’t know that the light has a finite speed, or why it would be different in vacuum”, Lyra shrugged.

“So, you’re basically the greatest mind of seventeenth century science?”, Hermione giggled.

“Pretty much”, Lyra took a biscuit with apricot jam. “Would you please give me a crash course in the twentieth century physics, as they call it?”, she winked.

“Can I listen?”, Arthur’s eyes were wide.

“Sure, but keep up”, Hermione nodded.

“So, I’ll have to explain several concepts, but they rely heavily on what you already know. For instance, yes, the speed of light exists, and it’s different in vacuum because light consists of tiny luminous particles called photons, that travel straight and unimpeded in the vacuum of space, while they bounce into particles of matter when they travel in a liquid or gas, or they outright get absorbed in solid matter. The speed of light in vacuum is around 300000 km/s, and less in a medium”, Hermione looked at her to see if she’s keeping up.

“So, when you say that an object has an orbital velocity of the speed of light, this means that if you turn on a source of light on its surface, the particles of light would bend around it and keep falling in perpetuity rather than escape into space, which means no light can escape it, which explains why it’s called a black hole”, she nodded. “Things fall in, and nothing comes out, since I assume nothing is faster than light?”, she inquired, as Arthur looked at her with mouth agape.

“Correct”, Hermione smiled brilliantly.

“Does the speed of light depend on the colour of its components? For instance, is blue faster than red?”, Lyra frowned.

“No. The components differ in their specific energy, that can be measured when it is absorbed by matter, but their speed is the same. Also, and this will be weird, light particles propagate in waves, and so each photon has a specific wavelength, which is, I guess, a distance between two adjacent crests on a wave as it propagates. Red has a longer wavelength while blue has shorter, because, I guess, like a compressed spring that contains more energy”, Hermione struggled to explain.

“I figured out some of it from Newton’s ‘Opticks’”, Lyra nodded. “Light can interfere as if it were a wave, and yet it also behaves as if it were made of particles. I’m glad to hear that a definite conclusion was made later regarding that”.

It was now Hermione’s turn to stare with mouth open, but she collected herself. “Anyway, they learned other things, such as the fact that the wavelength of light stretches or compresses depending on whether the object radiating light is travelling toward you or away from you, and this is also the case with sound and other waves”.

“You mean, that’s why sounds become higher as I travel toward them fast on a broom, and lower as I travel away from them?”, Lyra perked up in realisation.

“Exactly so”, Hermione confirmed. “It’s called the Doppler effect”.

“How does this relate to astrophysics?”, Lyra asked.

“Well, most directly, it allows us to know whether some star is moving towards us or away from us”, Hermione answered.

“Oh, I get it. The light it produces would shift towards red or blue. If it is reddish, it would mean that it is moving away from us, and if it is bluish, it would mean it’s moving towards us. But how can you tell whether it’s a star that travels away from us, or it’s just a star of a naturally reddish colour?”, Lyra wanted to know.

Hermione looked at her with complete amazement, thinking that’s probably how Newton would look at Archimedes or Aristotle if they got the chance to talk. “Now, there’s a thing. The stars have types, and they have a life cycle, and there’s a specific characteristic they tend to have depending on their mass and their place in their lifecycle. If you know that a star is naturally yellow, and you perceive it as reddish, it means its spectrum is shifted”.

Lyra nodded. “I get it, but I guess you would have to know first in order to extrapolate the transformation”.

“Exactly, which is why there’s lots of assumptions in astrophysics, and occasionally it gets corrected, when they realise that something isn’t a very big red-shifted object very far away, but a much smaller, naturally red object much closer”, Hermione nodded.

“I get it”, Lyra nodded in return. “What are stars, actually?”

“They are in essence the same category of objects as our Sun. They are big, very massive, and they produce light by fusing light atoms of matter into heavier ones due to the extreme pressure in their cores”.

“There are many things I don’t understand there, for instance how that actually works, why atoms need to be pressed together and why they produce light when they are joined together”, Lyra frowned.

“Well, what you need to understand is that atoms don’t actually exist, in the way Democritus imagined them. Sure, matter consists of smaller particles, but those particles consist of even smaller particles. Every atom consists of a nucleus and a swarm of electrons, that have a negative electric charge. The nucleus consists of protons and neutrons that are all bound together. Protons and neutrons have about the same mass, and all the mass of an atom is contained in its nucleus. Protons differ from the neutrons in that they have a positive electric charge. There are forces in the atom that keep the electrons attracted to the core at one distance, and repelled when they come closer”, Hermione struggled to explain.

Lyra gave it a thought. “What is an electric charge?”

Hermione started fidgeting and pulling at her hair as she tried to figure out an explanation. “The ancient Greeks discovered electric charge when they were rubbing amber on wool and it would produce glowing sparks”.

“Ah, so that’s why those negatively charged particles are called elektron, which means amber”, Lyra perked up.

“Exactly. Such sparks happen when there’s a difference of electrically charged particles in different objects, and when they equalize with a spark. Lightning is merely a very big spark. The muggles made all sorts of discoveries regarding electricity, like the way electricity can travel through metal and produce magnetism. You know what that is, right?”, Hermione was curious.

“Yes, certain stones tend to point in a north-south direction and attach themselves to iron”, Lyra nodded.

“When electric charge travels through a metal wire, it produces the same effect, and it’s called electromagnetism. Similarly, as Earth spins, making a full circle every day, some of its molten interior layers spin at different speed due to drag, and it creates a magnetic field around the entire Earth, which manifests as magnetic poles, which attract the magnets to themselves and create the phenomenon you are familiar with”, Hermione confirmed.

Lyra thought about it. “I guess different kinds of matter have different structure, which is why it works for metal and not for wood or dirt. I guess those electrons around a nucleus in an atom, that are attracted at one distance and repelled at another, can also be lost, or exchanged between atoms, or expelled to create an electric charge”.

Hermione was even more stunned, but tried to continue. “Very much so. All the matter we normally see is made when two atoms share electrons between them. Those are called chemical bonds, and they combine atoms of different elemental substances, also called elements, into chemical compounds, such as water or salt”, she nodded.

“And I guess the atoms can have more or less energy – if something is cold, it would have less energy and the atoms would come closer together and form a solid, but if you heat it up, it would form a liquid and then a gas, as the atoms get far enough apart from the excess of energy that they fly off”, Lyra offered.

Hermione’s eyes went wide. “Exactly so. And if you compact the atoms together by force, introducing outside pressure, they will bleed the excess energy until they become cold enough to naturally be able to function at such proximity without repelling each other”.

“And if you apply enough pressure, the cores of different atoms, that are normally separated by a layer of electrons, will bump into each other and form a different kind of atom, with all their combined protons and neutrons forming a new nucleus?”, Lyra inquired, to Hermione’s amazement. Arthur, on the other hand, lost them very long ago and just looked confused.

“That’s exactly right”, Hermione confirmed. “And in some cases, when the atoms are light because they contain only one or two protons, this will produce an excess of energy as some of the bonds within the nucleus release in form of light, which is what happens in the stars. On the other hand, when very heavy atoms are broken apart, which can also happen, the excess of energy is released and two lighter atoms are produced”.

“So, I guess depending on how heavy a star is, it will produce slightly different light. Also, as it keeps spending the light atoms and producing the heavy ones, it will eventually run out of light atoms and this is probably what you meant as stars aging through their life cycle”, Lyra offered.

“This is exactly right”, Hermione confirmed, with profound amazement. “And when a star grows very old, and runs out of all atoms that are light enough to produce an excess of energy in a process of nuclear fusion, the balance of pressure and gravity is disturbed because production of light no longer creates an outward pressure and all the matter collapses inwards, creating an incredibly strong explosion”.

“Wait, are those the stellae novae the ancients wrote about? When a new star appears, or becomes much brighter for a while, only to fade away later?”, Lyra remembered.

“It is exactly so, and this is why in astrophysics, those are indeed called stellae novae, or just novae. There’s also a category of “super nova”, which is a particularly large explosion that happens with stars much massive than our Sun, because the energies involved are much greater. Also, when those extreme energies and masses are involved, there gets to be a remnant of the exploding star, that is so dense, that all the mass collapses together with such force, that the protons lose their electric charge and transform into neutrons, and the entire object consists of neutrons tightly pressing together, with the entire thing rotating as fast as thousands of times per second”.

“Oh, so that’s what you meant by a ‘neutron star’. It’s a remnant of a dying star that spins very quickly and is made of only neutrons”, Lyra nodded.

“Exactly. And this object is very small and incredibly dense, and this creates incredibly sudden, violent rises in gravity, which means that if you were to fall into it, it would pull your feet so much stronger than it would pull your head, that it would exceed the attractive forces between the atoms of your body and draw you out into a string of liquid. This is actually called ‘spaghettification’ in astrophysics. When we add the effects like frame-dragging caused by the extremely fast spin of the neutron star and a black hole, you get the effect where the spaghetti-ribbon consisting of extremely overheated atoms of the unfortunate thing falling in start wrapping around the massive object as a glowing ring”, Hermione explained.

“Which is what you did to those unfortunate idiots”, Lyra grinned.

“Exactly”, Hermione smiled.

“And I guess the sole difference between a neutron star and a black hole is in its gravity, because a black hole is so massive that even the light can’t escape it, while a neutron star is close enough but not there yet”, Lyra raised an eyebrow.

“Exactly so”, Hermione nodded. “The distance from the black hole at which the escape velocity is the speed of light is called the ‘event horizon’, because it’s the point after which nothing can escape the black hole to tell the tale of what’s inside”.

Lyra nodded. “I think I got it. Can you please get me some muggle books about that, so that I can learn it in more detail? It sounds very interesting, and I’m completely ignorant of it all, obviously”.

“You may be ignorant, but this was the most impressive feat of raw intelligence that I ever witnessed in my entire life, and if I didn’t already worship you as my personal deity, I’d start now”, Hermione looked at her sister adoringly.

“Are the two of you even human?”, Arthur managed to say. “Because I don’t think so”.

“Oh, I’m just a very smart human”, Hermione winked. “I still don’t know what she is”, she added.

“Hermione, you held my hand and checked my cervix for dilation when I was giving birth. You know exactly how human I am”, Lyra smiled.

“True, but you just may be some deity taking human form”, Hermione pointed out. “It’s actually the most parsimonious explanation”, she grinned as her sister hid her head under the sweater and whined.

“Hello sweetheart”, Arthur addressed Crookshanks the cat who got up from his bed under the portrait of Sirius, stretched, yawned and came to meet him. “Still miss your friend?”, he looked at Sirius, as the cat rubbed his head on his leg and he kneeled down to pet him. “You’re a good boy”.

“Hello Lyra”, he stood up and looked at the young woman who came to greet him. “It’s so nice to see you”, he hugged her. “Is Hermione all right?”, he whispered.

“She’s fine. Somewhat shaken, but nothing more. Come, see for yourself”, she led him to the couch where Hermione rose up to greet him.

“Hello Arthur”, she smiled as he embraced her.

“I was so worried when I saw the news”, they sat down as Lyra went to get them tea and biscuits.

“How did they let you go there all alone?”, he pulled fingers through his hair.

“Well, here’s the thing. We didn’t know what we’ll find. We knew they were smugglers. We knew they moved stolen goods to and from that location. We knew the hut was protected against remote viewing and apparition. We knew there’s several of them, and we decided to send an Auror to be safe, rather than risk ordinary magical police force. You see, smugglers who have a shielded base in the middle of nowhere rather than somewhere in town is already a red flag. There were things there that they didn’t want seen, and that could be anything. What we didn’t know was that they weren’t smugglers – they were murderers who used smuggling to get money”, she nodded. “So, our hunch to send an Auror to deal with mere smuggling ended up being justified. Unfortunately, the problem was still worse than we suspected, much worse, and I was initially overwhelmed”.

“Why you, of all people?”, Arthur wondered.

“Well, I’m a new Auror and what better way for me to get used to the work, than go on a job that looked barely worth sending an Auror for?”, she laughed. “It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. What else was I supposed to do? Guard Azkaban?”.

“No, I guess not”, he agreed. “But…”

“How did I miss it and put my sister in harm’s way?”, Lyra offered, as she brought refreshments. “That’s the thing with shielding. You don’t know what’s being shielded. I had to guess based on the sort of crime that’s being committed – theft of imported goods from a warehouse, selling it on the black market. Not exactly terrible. We hardly even deal with small fry like that in the office, and forward it to the ordinary law enforcement. However, there was something weird about this one. Their base was too remote to make economical sense. Too large travel distance. Also, too much shielding, of too great power and sophistication. They usually never bother; they assume nobody will look, and if they get caught they try to get away quickly and abandon the goods. Shielding against apparition isn’t something you do to protect imported cauldrons and invisibility cloaks. You do it to protect something really important. So, we decided to deal with it ourselves, and Hermione volunteered because she was bored and wanted to finally do something”, she smiled. “Had I known, I’d send Viktor with her, which would make it much harder for criminals to overwhelm them initially, and she’d likely not have to resort to her last line of defence, which was to use space to crush them”.

“I read about them being liquified”, Arthur looked questioningly. “What did you do to them?”

“I touched magic directly, and saw them as four dim lights around me, and since I was under a full body-bind curse, I couldn’t move my eyes to target them visually I had to rely on that, and I touched space with magic on all four dim lights at once, and crushed and swirled. I later looked up and didn’t find anything about that in magical literature, and then I tried Muggle literature. They describe space doing terrible things like that in the context of astrophysics – objects of enormous mass like neutron stars and black holes that produce a gravity well with a very steep gradient, specifically a quickly rotating massive object that also introduces extreme angular momentum on a steep gradient, like a very fast rotating neutron star, or a Kerr black hole”. She saw that they are looking at her with eyes glazed over and mouths open. “Anyway, I fortunately contained the effect to them specifically because had that extended outside them, it could have easily killed me and destroyed everything there”, she finished.

Lyra managed to get her bearings first. “So, basically, the differences in density of space and differences in its rotational speed tore every part of them from every other part of them, and continued to do it until they were liquid, or close enough”, she explained it to Arthur.

“Isn’t that hard to do when you’re surprised and petrified on the floor?”, he wondered.

“No, in fact it’s the easiest thing to do”, Hermione explained. “It’s like pressing a button on an onion blender”. She saw his confusion. “A muggle device that works on electricity. It has a motor that turns a knife that spins in circle in a jar and cuts onions into small fragments when you press the button”. He nodded. “Anyway, I contained, crushed and swirled, came out of deep magic, saw what became of them, called Lyra and threw up”, she smiled.

“How did you call her?”, Arthur wondered.

She tapped her wrist, and a red circle showed up on both her and Lyra’s wrists. “We made this to keep in touch when the babies were very little, so that one of us can go to work and the other one could notify her when they are awake. Lyra was exploring Voldemort’s dark mark, and this is technically similar, but much more sophisticated. You can tap it and it glows, tap it twice and it starts blinking, which notifies us that babies are up, or you can tap and talk and it functions as a muggle radio, so we can talk to each other at a distance. It turned out to be so useful, we left it there even when it wasn’t needed, because it now allows me to call my boss for reinforcements when I’m in over my head”, she smiled blissfully at her sister. “And when you’re done, you do this”. She stroked over the circle with her palm and it went off.

“That’s amazing magic”, Arthur was in awe. “Which one of you made it?”

“Both of us”, Lyra smiled. “We talked about what we wanted, and since it’s the kind of a spell that requires consent, we both just figured it out together as we held hands”.

“Can you connect to other people with the same thing?”

“In theory, but in practice we don’t want to. We thought about it but we just don’t want to give other people the ability to pull our strings or disrupt us. It’s just between the two of us because we decided we wanted to stay connected when we are apart”, Hermione smiled.

“So, the Dark Mark inspired a baby alarm”, he laughed.

“At least something good came of it”, Lyra snickered.

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.

“Expelliarmus. 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.