“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”.

“I’m so glad you came”, Lyra looked at aunt Andromeda with a big smile. “We are incredibly bored, now that we can’t really leave home much and go visit people because of the babies”, she adjusted Lucia’s position on her breast. “Also, Teddy is a blessing; James and Lily get bored and neglected now that we have to constantly wrap our lives around the newborns. They love to play with him”. Hermione nodded approvingly, listening to the sounds of children giggling upstairs.

“He pretends to be above those things because he’s so much older, but he can hardly wait to see them”, the older woman smiled. “I’ll let the others know when I visit; they’ll be glad to come and see you, but they didn’t know if you’re too busy with the babies”.

“Oh, we’re busy, but we’re also starved for company”, Hermione sighed. “We’re used to always being around people and visiting everybody and we miss it. I can’t even read books now because it takes too much focus away from the baby, and the men are dealing with the work and the politics for all four of us, so they are hardly ever home”.

“About that, Lucius and Narcissa have been completely socially rehabilitated after dealing with that scum”, Andromeda giggled. “Everybody loved it. They’re no longer seen as the two Death Eaters who eschewed punishment for their crimes, but rather as the tough, protective grandparents minding the babies while the parents get to stretch their legs a bit. I visited them last night, and everything is much brighter there. They no longer look depressed or anything. Rather, they like their new role as the senior protectors of their heritage”.

“I’m glad to hear it”, Hermione smiled. “I was worried about them for a while”.

“The newspapers are in a buzz about Lyra addressing the court”, the older woman nodded wisely. “They are saying that she’s the least intimidating most powerful Witch in the world”, she grinned. “They are describing you as a soft, kind young mother who casually disarmed the entire Wizengamot as a demonstration, and then excused herself to go nurse her baby”, she smiled at the young blonde. “I think they are starting to outright adore you”.

“As they should”, Hermione smiled at her blushing sister, kissing baby Igor’s head.

“They quoted you saying that it doesn’t matter what you can do, and they should rather look at what you’re actually doing, and then they remember you destroying all the dementors, hunting down the Werewolves and the Death Eaters, and dealing with murderous thugs, first as an Auror, and then as head of the Auror Office, and ended up quoting the Minister, saying that it’s perfectly right and proper for the head of the Auror Office to be the most competent magical person in the world, adding that the fact that it just happens to be an adorable young woman is a big bonus”, she grinned. “They also mentioned Harry and his treaty with the Goblins, and asked him how come you two are not Ministers with your political acumen. He told them that you are more useful as national security shields, with your skills, and one can hardly argue with that”, she nodded. “There was also a passing mention of your motherhood laws, and how well that worked – specifically now that you were giving birth and nursing, and there’s been no interruptions at work since your husband deals with things that require physical presence and your mind is still completely available when he needs your help”.

“I’m looking forward to working with Viktor like that”, Hermione sighed. “I missed him when we worked different jobs and couldn’t be together at work”.

“I cannot imagine that we used to all work like that before”, Andromeda noted. “It is all wrong”.

“Hermione was teaching me about the muggles and their ways of doing things, and how we somehow copied their foolish ways”, Lyra looked at her aunt. “Some of it looks like a societal suicide pact – things like feminism. I honestly never heard of a worse bunch of nonsense, but Hermione convinces me they are quite serious with it and say it all with a straight face, things like women actually aspiring to be strong and independent, without realising that it actually means dying alone without love. It is as if they are actively trying to achieve a state of complete failure”.

Andromeda looked at her as if trying to understand if she’s missing a joke. “You can’t be serious?”

“Oh, she is”, Hermione nodded. “I actually adopted some of that insanity briefly, so I understand how insidious it can be. Essentially, they are convincing women that men are unreliable, violent and what not, and they might eventually either leave them or abuse them, so they need to live in a state of constant wariness and readiness for such an outcome – have their own money and always be ready for divorce. That’s what that ‘strong and independent’ nonsense actually means”.

“But if you’re living that way, constantly treating your husband as a potential or actual enemy, without love and trust, you will be actively ruining your marriage and directly causing the outcome you are preparing against”, Andromeda was aghast.

“Exactly”, Hermione nodded. “Which explains the extremely high divorce rate, especially among the feminists”.

“Is that fear of abusive husbands actually grounded in fact? Did the muggles have some epidemic of spousal abuse, or men abandoning wives and children?”, Lyra was curious.

“In fact, no. I looked into the statistics. It was almost unheard of. Men who abandoned or abused their families were socially ostracised and seen as the lowest of the low, and for the most part, they lived in harmonious and loving families very much as we do. Then they started introducing all sorts of social reforms calling it progress, and messed everything up. In fact, the only statistically relevant reason for women being abandoned was when their husband died. There were work accidents and wars, and a woman with children without a man to take care of them and earn money would find herself in a terrible predicament. Society tried to accommodate for them, but all those reforms in the last two centuries seem to have caused terrible wars where huge numbers of men died and their families needed to survive somehow, and this seems to have coincided with the feminist nonsense”.

“So, basically, their reformist, progressive ideologies caused the problems that they then blamed on the traditional marriage?”, Lyra surmised.

“Pretty much so”, Hermione smiled. “They essentially employed arsonists in the fire department”.

“Fire department?”, Andromeda asked as if she never heard of it.

“The muggles, not knowing magic, can’t easily extinguish fires when they happen, so they have people who come and spray water on the fire to extinguish it”, Hermione explained. “Fire department, police and ambulance are considered the most basic services in a society”.

“Spraying water on a fire instead of an Extinguishing Charm”, aunt Andromeda gestured incredulously. “It would get all the furniture soaked and ruined”.

“It does”, Hermione laughed. “When the fire department extinguishes a fire in your house, the house is pretty much ruined, but they stop the fire spreading to other houses”.

“No wonder they invented feminism”, Andromeda was exasperated. “They are completely unreasonable people”.

“The only time in my life when I had to be strong and independent was when my parents made our ancestral home into a den of Voldemort and his minions, and Harry left me, thinking I sided with Voldemort, and kissed other girls. I thought I would die alone and never have children, and the only reason why I didn’t kill myself was to care for my parents. It was the most desperate, hopeless, darkest and terrible two years of my life and I am actively trying never to think about them because it was so horrible. Actively working on turning your life into that, as if it were somehow a worthy goal rather than the worst possible outcome, is indeed so irrational, so self-defeating and stupid, that my mind refuses to accept that there are people who would choose that”, Lyra shivered.

“And yet, there are, and this shows you what propaganda can do if applied diligently for a long time with incredible funds”, Hermione nodded. “They even convinced people that smoking cigarettes makes you cool, independent and sophisticated”.

“Cigarettes?”, the two women asked curiously.

“Small wads of some herb called tobacco, that are lit on fire on one end, so that a person inhales the smoke, which causes a mildly calming effect, but is very addictive and causes all sorts of deadly illnesses in the long run”, Hermione explained.

“Those people are completely insane”, they both nodded in agreement as Hermione broke into laughter. “Seeing it from your perspective makes it extremely hard to disagree”.

“Have you ever thought about how much stronger you are than Dumbledore at this point?”, Harry asked his wife as they lay in bed.

She considered it. “I don’t think about him in those terms, ever. With him, it’s never a matter of power. I know people see him as the most powerful wizard of the modern age, but I see him as the ultimate protector and moral authority. When I die, I hope to have lived my life in such a way as to be worthy of his praise”, she smiled gently. “In my mind, I’m still that girl who begged him on my knees to save my family. Comparing my power to his would feel like sacrilege”.

“I see what you mean. I literally experienced that – dying and having him welcome me there and give me advice, and it felt so wonderful to have him praise me. He’s the closest thing to a father I remember having, other than the few very early, faded memories of my actual parents”.

“The one I compare myself to is Voldemort. He was the one who frightened me, degraded my family, could take everything away from me, and turned my life into a living nightmare”, she frowned and held him tighter. “I started feeling truly safe only after I advanced my magical skills to the point where I could beat someone like him easily, at any time, any conditions, with all of his followers supporting him. I hated feeling like everything I have is merely conditional – I have it just because he or someone like him didn’t come here to take it, the way your parents had everything until he came that night to take it. I swore I’d practice so that nobody could come in the middle of the night and take everything away from us”, she kissed his neck. “But right now, I’m already counting my miracles. We managed to finally have sex. Finally. Please, let’s sleep because I had four hours of sleep in the last two days and if the babies wake up now, I swear to God I’m going to go insane”, she giggled. “Sleep. Now. No talk”.

“Yes Ma’am”, he smiled and kissed her goodnight.

…

“Lady Lyra, we apologise for asking you to come to us so soon after your childbirth, but we do need to ask you some things, and we promise we’ll let you go home quickly”, an elderly gentleman in the Wizengamot addressed her apologetically.

She nodded. “Please, ask whatever you will”.

“We wish to know the true extent of your power”, an elderly lady spoke. “There have been rumours, but we wish to hear it from you”.

Lyra smiled, and closed her eyes. A big pile of wands was arrayed neatly on the desk before her. “Please, all of you, take out your wands”. They tried, and found them all missing.

“You will see that they are all here with me”, she smiled.

The gentleman who spoke first addressed her again, with a trembling hand this time. “You disarmed us all in a blink of an eye. All fifty of us. Some of the most powerful witches and wizards in the country are in this room, and you completely overpowered us, in a heartbeat, and we couldn’t do anything about it”, he fumbled.

She smiled, closed her eyes and the wands vanished. “You can now check your pockets again”.

They did, and nodded – each got their own wand back.

“How can we know that you won’t abuse your power?”, another man from the audience voiced.

“You can’t, and even if you could, you couldn’t do anything about it. But fear not – you were never the ones who kept me in check in the first place”, she smiled. “There are greater forces at play than you”, she looked at them gravely. “Forces like my wish to be the kind of a person that deserves my family’s love. Or my wish for my husband’s approval. Or a wish for Headmaster Dumbledore’s approval when I die and meet him. Those things keep me fettered very tightly”, she smiled. “I ask that you trust me. I had to live three years in the house of horrors that Voldemort made my home into. I don’t wish to become one such monster, who would keep some innocent person in fear. That is the limit placed on my power. As for what I can do, this, I think, is no longer important. I can do quite a lot. The important question is what I actually did, what I actually do, and what I wish to do in the future. As for that, I wish to sleep more, because my baby keeps waking me because she’s hungry or bored or has a full diaper”.

They all laughed, despite themselves. “I can understand that”, an elderly lady giggled. “I am also very sorry that we wasted your time with this inquiry, because there is truly nothing you did that would require it. It is what you could do that worries us, but I guess someone who can trivially disarm the full court but wishes only to have a good night’s sleep is the last person in the world we should be worried about”. Almost everybody nodded and murmured in assent.

A band of light started blinking red on Lyra’s wrist. “This is my sister Hermione letting me know that the babies are awake and will soon start making a mess because they miss me”, she smiled. “So, unless you have news about the impending end of the world, return of the Dark Lord or Santa Claus falling from his sled and ending up in St. Mungo, I will have to excuse myself”, she shrugged apologetically.

“By all means, Lady Lyra”, the first gentleman smiled. “Give our love to your family, and again, please accept our apologies for disturbing you so soon after childbirth”.