“This storm is far from being over”, Hermione noted, reading her copy of the Daily Prophet over breakfast.

“What do they say”, Harry sipped his tea.

“People are praising the Aurors for standing up for their bosses, and mentioning how they gave Viktor a hero’s welcome after the interview with him came out. Also how they showered Lyra with rose petals when she came to work. There are comments from the readers – women are swooning over Viktor standing up for Lyra by threatening to duel anyone who says a word against her. If Ron wanted you to become the most popular people in the world, he did a good job”, she smiled.

“Anything about how Ron is doing?”, Viktor put down his half-finished croissant.

“Yes, in fact”, his wife smiled at him. “He was seen sleeping rough in Diagon Alley, before someone took him in, apparently. It’s not clear, but he tried with a dozen people, family and friends, and they all had him kiss the door. There are also articles from people remembering him being nasty before, but forgave him for being Harry Potter’s friend. They are writing an angle where he was in fact a pampered little prince who always got away with everything, while his friends had to work for everything. They say he betrayed his friends every time he thought it would benefit him, and they kept forgiving him. It appears to be a ‘hate Ron Weasley’ week”, she closed the newspaper.

“I think his problem is that he kept pulling off the same stunt, it always worked, and he never bothered to figure out why that is”, Lyra mused, wiping powdered sugar off her lips with a napkin. “It was like assuming air or gravity. It’s always there so why even think about it. Now that I think of it, he used to be almost as rude to Hermione as I was, initially, but somehow he was seen as cute and I was seen as evil incarnate and a devil child. He was taken in, while I was locked out. So, he never gave it a thought. That was how things worked. I, on the other hand, had to revise my whole life to see what I did wrong, why it was perceived the way it was, and I was on the bottom of a slippery pit trying to climb out, and people were glaring at me from the edge, ready to push me back in, because I seemed to be all the wrong things. Conversely, when he would stumble, multiple pairs of hands were always extended to get him back up. Sure, I was rich in terms of money, and he was the opposite, but he seems to have been rich in social capital he kept drawing on, not even realising it’s there, the way I never realised money was a thing until I saw people who didn’t have it. But I realised money was a thing when I was eleven. He literally never gave his social wealth a single thought, he never considered what an advantage he had by being born in the core of the Order of Phoenix, and what it would have been like to be born in a family of Death Eaters, what a pit that would be to climb out of. He just assumed things are the way they are, assumed that he deserved everything he had and perceived it as nothing, and complained about the things he didn’t have and all the expectations people have of him, as if that’s even a problem”, she finished.

“You’re right about that, and I actually never thought about it that way”, Hermione was lost in memories. “He did say all kinds of nasty things about me – how he hoped we didn’t get sorted in the same house, how I was pompous and annoying, imitated me mockingly and so on. He literally drove me to tears, and yet somehow it all got swept under the carpet when he and Harry helped me with that troll. He always cared more about his food than his friends, and his emotional spectrum consisted of being embarrassed and feeling sorry for himself. You, on the other hand, made one blunder and we just locked you out for years, until you did that ‘either kill me or treat me like a person’ thing in the hallways. That’s when we actually started seeing you as a human being and not just an evil Slytherin girl. You really did have a pit to climb out of in order to even be acknowledged. He, on the other hand, just was. People always saw him, cared about his feelings, forgave him for his stupid nonsense, and gave him the benefit of the doubt. I’m sorry to say this, but you were seen as hostile background noise. We should be feeling as guilty for treating you that way as you feel guilty for messing up, if not more.”

“That thing about invisible social capital that he kept relying on without noticing it is even a thing, that’s an excellent observation”, Viktor nodded. “I never thought about it that way”.

“People never do, until it’s gone”, Harry smiled. “They don’t notice having loving parents and just assume it’s normal. People just assumed I had to be a pampered kid, because how famous I was for no good reason. They assumed I had to be a spoiled brat, and treated me like one. They never stopped to think that I was famous for having my parents killed while I was a baby in the crib, and that I was brought up by the Dursleys who treated me like trash; that I was always hungry, wearing Dudley’s old clothes and sleeping in a broom cupboard under the stairs. They assumed that just because they had things, it was a given that others have it at least as good. In fact, the only people who actually felt me in that way were Neville and Luna, who had similar personal tragedies.”

“And I assumed that since I knew you were one of the wealthiest people in the world, that you had to know it, and it never dawned to me until much later that you never even knew about it until literally days ago. I would never have thought, in a million years, that you lived a life of abject poverty and neglect, and nobody ever told you they loved you”, Lyra’s eyes glistened. “I saw how you seemed to be offended by my very existence because I wore nice new clothes, and I thought you just hated me as a person; I never even realised that you think you’re a homeless orphan who has always been told he’s a burden. I was always told I’m a precious treasure and my parents’ love and pride was like air in which I moved. I couldn’t even comprehend what you went through. It was such an implicit assumption to me that everybody has it the same way, that I only started to turn my brain on when you completely locked me out because my very being was offensive to you”.

“I guess Ron was never made to reconsider the existence of air”, Viktor nodded. “I wonder how many other implicit assumptions we all hold, never thinking about them or knowing they are there until the floor comes out beneath our feet”.

“I know how shocked I was when Lyra confronted me. It was not just the shock of how she did it, but the shock of understanding that she might even want to. It was the realisation that she’s not just some rich moustache-twirling villain like Dick Dastardly or Cruella de Vil who is evil because she likes being evil, but an actual girl with feelings that can be hurt, and enough courage to give me a choice between respect and death. When I actually had to think about it, I realised I was a total jerk and I didn’t like the feeling”, Harry reminisced.

“Dick who?”, Viktor scratched his head.

“Old muggle cartoons”, his wife smiled and explained. “It’s an animated hand-drawn life-like thing. I’ll show you”.

“Show me too, I had no idea that even existed”, Lyra smiled.

“Yeah, that’s one of those implicit assumptions. I assume everybody knows what cartoons are”, Harry laughed.