“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”.

“Harry, what is it?” Hermione looked in alarm as he stopped chewing his sandwich and stared at the wall with eyes open in shock.

“Pig”, he managed to say after swallowing. “I remembered.”

“Oh”, it was now her turn. “You mean, how he treated him?” Her eyes started filling with tears, remembering how Ron abused his tiny, friendly, gentle owl. He would yell at him, handle him roughly, insult him and lock him up and leave him like that.

“That would have been you and your children if you were stubborn enough to marry him”, Harry stared, still in shock.

“Wait, what?”, Lyra looked at both of them.

“Sirius gave Ron a pet owl. He was a beautiful, playful, happy little thing. It was supposedly to compensate for the loss of his pet rat, who turned out to be Peter Pettigrew in his Animagus form”, Harry explained. “Ginny called the owl Pigwidgeon, and Ron shortened it to Pig out of sheer malice and contempt, and kept treating him as if he were a nuisance. Everybody loved the little fellow, except Ron, who always treated him like a burden and tried to get rid of him. He eventually left him in the Burrow when we went undercover, because we couldn’t take care of him while fighting our guerilla war”. He stopped and his lips trembled, then took a breath to calm himself. “Arthur and Molly later told me in private that Ron locked Pig up in a cupboard in his room, and put spells on it so he couldn’t break out, and nothing could be heard on the outside. He died of hunger and thirst by the time they went there to check”.

Hermione put a hand over her mouth and burst into silent tears.

“It’s a shame Lyra killed him quickly, because I’d like half an hour of private time with the bastard”, Viktor looked positively murderous as Lyra came to hug Hermione. “Чёрт его возьми, хуй”.

“Cornix cornicii oculos non effodiet”, Lyra smiled at him. “He and the Devil would get along too well for that to be a punishment”.

“People have pets because it’s a way for those of us who are socially awkward with humans to have a release for the feelings of love, care and gentleness with another being”, Harry mused. “To mistreat a vulnerable, gentle animal who loves you is really telling. I’m now thinking: if someone from Slytherin had a pet, and they treated him like Ron treated his pets, I would take it as evidence of their vile, corrupted and horrible nature, but with Ron, the bar was somehow so low, that even with that he didn’t manage to trip the alarm. I don’t think the Horcrux medallion put evil thoughts in his head. It just used what was already there. After all, I not only had the medallion and other Horcruxes with me, I actually was one. I had a piece of Voldemort’s soul in my head, placed there by accident when he tried to kill me and a fragment of his soul attached itself to the only living person in the room, when I was a baby. I could speak Parseltongue because of it, I could see through his eyes occasionally, I felt his thoughts and his evil; he even deliberately placed illusions in my mind through it. I never used it as an excuse, because I saw it as my duty to control myself, to restrict that evil once I felt it. I don’t know why I thought Ron should be excused. He was always one of the worst people we knew”, Harry looked positively disgusted.

“I think I’m starting to get it”, Hermione rubbed her temple. “I mean, what we talked about, how I managed to be stupid enough to fall for Ron, and what we talked about with Andromeda later”, she looked at her family over sandwiches and tea. “It all boils down to that insane feminist ideology the muggle world is marinating in constantly for the last hundred years”.

“What do you mean?”, Harry sipped his tea.

“Well, the core ideology goes like this. They reframed men from protectors to the main threat a woman can possibly face. Essentially, they would take a Voldemort-like man, someone who is a one in a ten thousand minority, the worst of the worst, and generalise him as something any man can be, so all women necessarily have to guard against”, she smiled as she looked at their horrified faces. “So, since every man is a potential Voldemort, a woman must at all times remain strong enough to not only survive on her own, but never show any weakness or vulnerability to any man, because it is certain to be exploited. Men are basically the enemy of women, and if you absolutely need to be with a man in order to have children, pick the weakest, safest one who can’t hurt you”, she finished.

“I don’t know who made that stuff up, but they should be permanently locked up in the muggle equivalent of St. Mungo’s department for the incurably mentally ill”, Lyra muttered in shock. “I can’t say I never heard anything more insane because I lived with Voldemort and the Death Eaters, but it’s up there”.

“Exactly”, Hermione nodded. “It took me a while to actually become aware of it all, but you are exactly right. It’s a completely insane ideology, but since I was exposed to it and adopted it inadvertently as a child, the way you adopted the Death Eater ideology of your parents to a degree, I simply went through the motions of manifesting it in my life, which meant crushing on the weakest, least aware, most incompetent member of our group. Someone I could keep in check if it went really bad”, she grinned bitterly. “However, what I didn’t realise is that Ron is the exact profile of that one in a ten thousand man who will hurt a woman. He’s weak, prone to lashing out on his friends or family to make himself feel stronger, and because he’s least likely to suffer consequences for it. He lacks awareness and empathy and only cares about his comfort and unearned privileges, he’s lazy, sees nothing wrong about being a burden on others, and sees nothing bad about treason if it benefits him”, she finished.

Harry and Viktor looked at each other and then at Hermione. “But why would you choose someone who’s actually the most likely person to hurt you? Especially since he already had a history of hurting you?”, Harry managed to put it into words.

“Because I thought I could manage it. It was survivable. I thought the worst he could do was something I could live with. And I was completely unaware of what I was doing, and insecure enough to never actually dig into it”, she nodded. “Now, because of the three of you, I’m feeling so secure I can think out loud and completely unguarded, and explore this stuff”, she smiled at Lyra, who just kissed her hand very gently.

“I think I see what you mean”, she looked at Hermione. “I had to deal with it when the Wizengamot asked me how can they know that I won’t abuse my power. It’s the question any woman has to ask regarding a man – how do I know you won’t hurt me, or leave me, because of course they technically can. If it’s someone like Voldemort, or the worst of scum he tended to collect, a woman would be well advised to steer clear. Such a man would truly be a nightmare. But the answer isn’t to destroy your life with constant paranoia and vigilance against all men because you lack discriminative abilities. The answer is to watch men carefully before and during the courting phase. Watch how they treat others. Especially watch how they treat those weaker than them, those who are vulnerable and in need of protection. I watched boys on my mom’s list very carefully during the first year at school. I watched what they do, how they react. Very quickly, I watched only Harry, because he was brave, protective, loyal, chivalrous, smart, he opposed injustice, even if it hurt me to realise that I ended up being on the wrong side of that, and he resisted authority when he thought he knew better, but was humble enough to apologise when he was wrong. And at some point, I realised there were no other names on my list. He was the one I will marry. He was the one I would say ‘yes’ to when he asks, and he’s the only one I will ever say ‘yes’ to. Of course, at that point he thought I was a devil child and he held me in utmost contempt, but that was a different problem”, she smiled as she returned to her sandwich.

“I wish I had known all that”, Harry nodded in dismay.

“Would you have treated me differently had you known?”, she retorted.

“I don’t know. Probably. There was the Voldemort problem, and I kept thinking there was that problem even two years after it stopped being one, so you can see how foolish and stubborn I’ve been, but it actually took Hermione to make me realise that you chose me and you were so serious about me so early on. I was too immature and too absorbed in all the other stuff that kept happening, and it was actually important stuff, like Voldemort, or Sirius, or Dumbledore. I realised fragments, like the fact that our talks or touching meant more to me than anything else, but my brain refused to connect the dots, because of what it would mean. And it was very hard for me to emotionally survive facing the truth because I realised what I’ve done to you with my idiocy”, he looked into her silver eyes with deep regret.

“In the end, it was watching the two of you that made me realise what a mistake Ron was”, Hermione looked at them adoringly. “Harry was the most competent, wise and dangerous Wizard of our generation. He literally dismantled Voldemort and killed him in a duel in front of the entire school, winning the war. According to the feminist theory, he was exactly the person a woman should select against, because he couldn’t be kept in check or controlled or protected against. And yet, he was the safest, most protective friend I could ever hope for. I looked at the two of you and I saw Lyra in absolute heaven, and then I felt pain in my heart because that’s what I wanted, and I chose the exact opposite for myself, and then I rebelled against it and saved myself from a lifetime of regret and pain”, she looked at her husband lovingly. “I ended up choosing the man who couldn’t be controlled or managed, but who didn’t have to be, and who made me feel safe, seen, and looked after”.

“This stuff can’t end well for the muggles”, Viktor mused, smiling at his true love. “This kind of hostility and paranoia between men and women has to eventually tear them apart”.

“It’s getting there”, Hermione nodded. “But it will get worse, and I don’t know if it can get better after that, or if their entire society will implode from the consequences, because if men and women don’t have each other to love, they will get so angry and miserable they will start outright killing each other”.

“This is a realistic problem, I’m afraid”, Harry acknowledged. “Realistic enough that we must account for it in our own national security analysis”.

“You have a point there”, Lyra nodded. “We need to write an analysis for our next security report to the higher-ups”.