“Hermione, I need your help.” Harry was deep in thought. “You figured it out so much earlier than me. You’re both smarter and more perceptive than me. Please, advise me. I don’t want to mess this up. I want to put it right. What am I not seeing? Tell me what to do”.

She finished her apple. “How do you feel about her? Be honest.”

“I always used to call her ‘the scary girl’ internally. That’s weird, because I find probably four people scary in the whole world. Voldemort. Snape. Bellatrix Lestrange. I can’t think who the fourth one might be. They are all the most dangerous monsters in the world.“

“I found her genuinely scary. I was thinking why, because it made no sense. She never harmed me. She never threatened me. She was always kind to me. I had the deepest conversations in my life with her and Dumbledore. She’s the most beautiful girl I ever saw, she’s more beautiful than anything I could possibly imagine. Her mind is crystal clear, powerful and pure. Her heart feels like the most amazing place in the world. What I actually think is that I’m scared of how important she is to me, and because the way she’s important is in contrast with the points of contention we had between us, that were too important to dismiss”, he mused.

“What were the points of contention, and are they still so now?” She looked straight into his eyes.

“Well, obviously, she’s a child of Death Eaters who worship Voldemort and she kept justifying both Voldemort and her parents, which I found terrifying. In hindsight, I was terrified of falling for her the way I should, while she has those attitudes and opinions”, he nodded, satisfied with his conclusion. “I don’t think she believes in any of the evil stuff any more. I think she’s just trying to survive and save her parents’ lives”.

“Harry, I need to know one thing. How serious are you with her? I’m asking you this because she’s a serious person. Don’t play with her heart. She’s not a school girlfriend. She’s the kind you say ‘yes’ to at the altar, and you mean it forever”, Hermione looked at him seriously.

“Hermione, she and I used to talk about what eye colour our children will have. I remembered it just before. I don’t know how or why I repressed it. I don’t know if she can forgive me for hurting her so much and abandoning her for two years. My behaviour towards her was horrible and I’m absolutely ashamed of myself”, Harry shivered slightly and rubbed his forehead.

“That’s the easy part. What I want to know is, do you want to ask her to marry you? Are you really, really serious? I have to repeat this – she’s a serious person. She chose you extremely long ago. She never wavered. You’re the one who broke you up. She’s not the kind of a person you can ever play with if you don’t mean it, and by ‘mean it’, it truly is what eye colour your children will have, and where you will live when you’re both old and grey. You need to treat her with the utmost respect and seriousness, because from what you told me, she’s in a desperate situation. You will either dedicate your life to dealing with this, or we shouldn’t even be having this conversation”, she emphasised her point.

Harry thought about it for a moment. “I was always serious. That’s why I found her terrifying. I was scared of either falling for her while she’s with the Death Eaters, or messing this up, because both options look terrifying. Yes, I want her as my wife. Forever. I want to bind my fate to hers. Whether we die together or have children and grandchildren, I don’t particularly care. How do I make this right after I messed it up so thoroughly?”

“Go to her as soon as you can, preferably at the funeral tomorrow, and confess. Tell her that you love her and that you want her. Ask if she will have you. Tell her the greatest truth you feel, directly. There should be no games, no nonsense or ambiguities of any kind. If I’m correct, the only thing she ever wanted to hear is that you love her, that you want her, and that you’re as committed to her as she is to you. Harry, you’re a very direct, loyal and committed person, but I’m afraid she is even more so. You can’t even imagine how serious she is. I saw her only in passing. She used to insult me with the stupid Death Eater nonsense. I will tell you, nothing ever hurt me as much as her insults, because of how seriously she meant them, and how much it hurt to be hated by such a great person. They no longer hurt because I think she changed her mind, but I would never, ever want to have that woman as an enemy. I would be thrilled to have her as a friend. She is incredibly focused, virtuous, moral, pure of heart and loyal. In that, she looks like your exact counterpart. I understand why you had reservations – when she’s wrong, it’s a terrible thing. She can do horrible evil when her will power combines with ignorance. But I suspect that to be loved by her would feel incredibly wonderful, the way it’s wonderful to be loved by you”, she finished with a smile.

“I do love you, you know”, Harry hugged her. “Thank you. You found me a way.”

“Say a good word for me when you get to truly talk to her, ok?”, Hermione smiled widely. “I never want to be on bad terms with that woman. She’s too wonderful not to have as a friend, and I wouldn’t want to miss it”.

…

“Hermione Granger” – a familiar voice sounded and Hermione froze in anticipation and uncertainty. “You killed Fenrir Greyback in battle. I swore vengeance against that vermin, but you did my work for me, and for this, I am in your debt. I am, however, already deeply in your debt for many years, for petty, pointless and untrue insults I directed at the good, pure woman who never did me any harm or wronged me in any way. Please, accept my deepest apologies”, Lyra bowed deeply before Hermione, whose lip started trembling and her eyes swam in tears. “And if you can find a way in your beautiful heart to forgive me, it would be my honour if you could consider me a friend”, she smiled shyly.

Hermione didn’t trust her voice and just embraced her. “Thank you, Lyra”, she whispered.

“No; thank you, Hermione, for being so patient with my terrible nonsense while I was learning. I cannot tell you how ashamed I was of the way I treated you while I was surrounded by that horrid vermin in my ancestral home, when I saw the ultimate end products of that ideology, and how terribly I wronged you. I yearned to apologise to you for years, but I had no opportunity to do so. But now, will you accept a gift from a friend?”, Lyra begged, and Hermione nodded.

Lyra waved her wand and two packages appeared. “This is a very ancient, rare tome from the Malfoy family library. I hear there are only three copies in existence, and this is one of them. I heard that you appreciate old books”, she winked. “The second gift is a box of very fine chocolates. We might share those over a cup of tea, if you will have me”, she smiled angelically. “And if you could be my maid of honour at our wedding, it would be my greatest honour and privilege”, she concluded mischievously.

Hermione just hugged her again and cried for real.

“I’m the dumbest ass in the history of dumbassery”, Harry said to himself. “Hermione deserves the right to tell me ‘I told you so’ until I die”.

“That’s a given, but why exactly?”, Hermione smilingly approached from behind and startled him.

“You were right about me and Lyra, and I was such a stupid idiot, you should charge me an idiot tax”, he smiled back ruefully. “You see, when I started looking at other girls after the Triwizard Tournament, I felt there’s something wrong. I ignored it, because there’s always something wrong. Then she saw me flirting and started avoiding me and looking at me like she wants to kill me. I concluded her dear Voldemort is back and she can no longer afford to have me as a friend, or even a frienemy. I missed our talks and I was angry at her for breaking us up. On the other hand, whenever I tried something with other girls, something was off, and something was missing. Everything was missing, actually, and I didn’t understand what. I thought Voldemort broke my brain by trying to break into it constantly, and I freaked out. Then I started hunting Lyra when I figured out she’s trying to kill Dumbledore, until I cornered her in the girls’ bathroom and hit her with that terrible thing, and when I held her bleeding body, I felt that thing that was missing coming back to me, and everything in my memory that resembled it lit up at the same time, and it was all her. It was like half of my brain coming back from deep coma. I stopped being angry and depressed all the time, and I understood that it was all because I missed her, and it’s not what I thought it was. I never had a name for what we are to each other. It’s not like anything I felt with other girls. It doesn’t feel romantic. She feels like a body part, honestly.”

“She’s your wife”, Hermione nodded.

“What?”, Harry fumbled in shock.

“You heard me. She’s not a girlfriend. It’s not a school romance. She’s not a friend. I’ve seen you together. I never saw anyone who isn’t married for at least ten years be like that. She seems to know, but you”, she sighed, “You should be hammering nails into hard wood with your head, because your head is harder than any rock”.

“Damn”, whispered Harry. “How did I manage to mess this up?”

“You were emotionally very invested into being oblivious”. She took an apple and left.

…

“Do you see the colour of my eyes?”, Lyra asked while they sat under a tree in the park.

“Of course I do”, Harry smiled.

“It’s in my family for untold centuries. It’s one of the genetic markers of a magical lineage. It was preserved because of our pure blood. You object to my arguments regarding pure blood. Do you like my eye colour?”, she asked, playing with his hand.

“I love your eye colour. It’s beautiful”, he answered honestly.

She slightly blushed. “I’m glad to hear it. However, since you argue for intermixing with the muggles, does that mean you would like my eye colour to vanish forever? Never to be seen in future generations?”

“That’s a hard question. I have to answer ‘no’, but that’s mostly because I’m very partial. I find you beautiful and I would not want any part of you gone. However, that’s hardly a political argument, and it’s also not fair”, he smiled. “But let me use another equally unfair argument. I have green eyes, and I inherited them from my mother. You object to intermixing with muggle-borns. Would you want my eye colour gone?”

“Harry Potter, that was a low blow and you know it”, she turned crimson.

“Par for the course, I guess”, he smiled at her silver eyes. “And if you and I married and had kids, and one of them had my eye colour, would you consider it a lamentable loss for the purity of your family line?”, he snickered, watching her embarrassment.

“Harry Potter, when we get to the point where we have children, their eye colour will be the least of our concerns”, she answered seriously.

“When?”, he noticed.

“When”, she confirmed.

…

“Hermione is right”, he thought, remembering. “I was truly emotionally invested into being oblivious, because nobody can be this stupid by accident.”

…

“You were right”, Harry smiled at his wife who nursed their third child, “I never cared about their eye colour”.

“It’s a win in either case”, she smiled back.

“How many muggles are there in the world today, in your opinion? I know you would know about those things”, she asked when they sat in the hallway. She looked him straight in the eyes, completely focused on the argument, while her body automatically did its thing. In this case, she held his right hand and doodled something on his palm with her index finger. Harry thought she didn’t even notice, and he realised that, for the most part, he didn’t either. For them, this level of casual physical contact was the baseline. He was never this physically intimate with anyone else, but Lyra was different. She was just Lyra. She would hammer his head into the wall when playing Quidditch, or fall into his embrace when afraid of something in the woods. They just didn’t find it strange, or awkward.

“Oh, almost seven billion, I guess”, he shrugged. The number was growing and he didn’t actually have the current count.

“So, how many of those seven billion are wizards?”, she proceeded, holding his one hand while resting her other hand on his knee.

“I’m the wrong person to ask; I think Ministry should know”, he shrugged.

“They do, in fact. My father got me the numbers. The number is around five hundred muggle born wizards per seven billion muggles”, she pressed. “This makes probability of a muggle-born wizard like your mom or Hermione a one in a fourteen million event.”

“Wow”, Harry scratched his scar. “This is really low odds”.

“Exactly”, she nodded, doodling unconsciously on his knee. “The probability of non-magical offspring from two magical parents is somewhat below one in a hundred. Now, please tell me what it means.”

“It means that introducing fully muggle genetics into the magical community would exponentially increase the probability of squibs, eventually diluting the magical genetics until the point of disappearance, or at least non-viability of the community because of low population numbers”, he conceded, squeezing her hand slightly. “It gives legitimacy to your argument, if that’s how that actually works. However, what if muggle-born magical children have concentrated magical genes already? In that case, dilution would not be an actual threat”, he countered.

“I hear you”, her palm got slightly sweaty as she stressed over the argument, lost in thought, her eyes moving as she thought about it in real time. “Your argument is that your mother, and your Granger friend, are both extraordinary witches. They are not just average. I heard only praise about your mother, from highest places. She was a generational talent. Granger is smarter than both of us together, I think. They look like highly concentrated magical essence, not like something that would dilute pure blood. However, is manifestation of genes an indication of actual genetics? What if they merely scored a combination of recessive genes manifesting a phenotype, and it would not carry through to the next generation?”, her eyes were calm now, boring holes through his, and she intertwined their fingers.

“That’s actually a good point, and I don’t know the answer”, Harry nodded. “However, I have some empirical data. My mother was muggle-born. My father was a pure-blood wizard from an ancient line. I turned out pretty well, if I may say so myself”, he smiled.

“You turned out perfect in every way”, she smiled back, as he blushed. “However, you might be merely a statistical anomaly, and it’s a single data point. You look like you won the genetic lottery, having the best of both and no apparent drawback other than the poor eyesight. However, are you a rule, or are you an exception?”, she pushed back, doodling on his knee.

“Well, do we have data about frequency of squib births in pureblood families, vs. mixed blood?”, he countered.

“Now, that’s a pickle. It seems to be a Poisson distribution issue. We don’t actually have a good data pool on either side, considering the low absolute population metrics”, she shrugged, drawing eights on his knee.

“So, you don’t really know if there’s an actual problem, or is it a storm in a teapot? And we’re actually having a war over this?”, he smiled, playing with her hand.

“Well, it’s potentially an extinction-level problem for the wizarding community, so it warrants extreme concern. However, your argument, that an internecine war is a more urgent extinction-level problem that we seem to be rushing into, and is actually worse, with certainties rather than probabilities, is valid”, she nodded and smiled.

Hermione was passing by in the hallway, looked at them, smiled, rolled her eyes and proceeded to her arithmancy class.

“What, Granger?”, Lyra growled.

“Ten points from both Gryffindor and Slytherin for the two of you not getting a room”, Hermione replied in a convincing imitation of Snape.

“Huh?”, Lyra shrugged, looking at Harry completely clueless, while he blushed.

“She’s just weird”, he shrugged. “Let’s go to class”.

The way they argued was quite a peculiar combination of intimacy and violence. They looked physically comfortable with each other, all awkwardness between a boy and a girl removed by the frequency of physical contact while playing Quidditch. However, what they told each other looked like pure verbal violence, that would normally have children tearing at each other physically. They, however, touched shoulders and looked as if they were eating ice cream together.

“How can you even say that Voldemort isn’t evil with a straight face? He killed my parents. He tried to kill me. Your parents are his servants and boot lickers. How about facing the reality of it?”, he frowned at her.

“There was a war. Your parents were on the opposing side. People die in wars, you know? They defied the Dark Lord, fought him, and lost. Then the Dark Lord tried to kill you, and lost. You won the war. How about ceasing to whine as if you’re somehow a victim? I understand that you lost your parents. That’s awful and I feel for you. Losing them and being raised by those muggles must have been terrible for you. But please don’t try to frame yourself as a victim and me as a villain when you personally won that war”. She looked at him with clear focus and truth behind those silver eyes, and he was out of words. She really had a point there, and yet he felt as if it’s not quite right, that the war isn’t over, that he didn’t actually win anything; he just failed to die. But her argument was so clear, so persuasive and respectful, that he felt it would be disrespectful to even reply in some incoherent way, which would be only way he could at the moment, so he just lowered his eyes in silence. She always wins.

She returned to her dormitory and cried into her pillow. “He told me my parents are Voldemort’s boot lickers and servants. He holds us in such contempt.”

She remembered this now, waved her head incredulously and smiled. I was such a dumbass, she thought. He was right. I refused to face the facts. I wrapped my mind in a knot trying to preserve the innocence and virtue of my parents, and refusing to concede that they were on the wrong side seemed like the only way. And how foolish it was to assume that the war was over. The ideas that started it hadn’t been resolved. The concept that identified purity with genetics rather than personal merit persisted. How idiotic one would have to be to believe Harry to be a “half blood”, and thus somehow less pure than the Carrows? They are not fit to be dirt beneath his feet. On the other hand, the Granger girl was an excellent student, excellent spellcaster, she was brave, virtuous and loyal to him. She wasn’t jealous of the girl; merely envious, because she was with him now. They fought together. I’m fighting merely to survive, to keep my parents alive, to retain my sanity and purity in this awful mess.

She cast her usual spells to protect the bathroom. They gave her one of the spare wands, taken from the prisoners. It rejected her, made it hard to wield magic, but she shrugged. Her wand is where it should be. He is fighting for her, and this makes a part of her participate.

She actually got really good at spellcasting since her heart was healed. She smiled happily. It was as if her magic increased when she felt she had her life back. Knowing he loved her made everything easier. Even the daily indignities and humiliations were easier to bear. Things like this – there’s no quick pee for her. No, it’s a matter of military logistics. Clear the bathroom, block the door, cast sensory blocks to prevent spying, cast anti-apparition spells. Check if the spells hold. All while having to pee. May the pit of hell open beneath Voldemort and all his minions and swallow them whole forever, and may curses of all the gods fall upon their heads.

However, she was no longer casting spells the normal way. At first, it was verbal. Revelio, protego and so on. Then it was non-verbal. But then as she did it for a while, she began to develop a taste for adjacent magic, for the place where verbal and thought spells lead, and she learned its “aroma”, feeling, and learned how to invoke magic with that feeling alone. Then she learned to mix feelings of different spells and invoke the magic together. She learned how the verbal spells were originally made. Someone felt the magic directly, brought it into their mind and bound it to a verbal spell, and carved it permanently into some layer of the world that’s between the layer of pure magic and human mind. So, now it’s easy to access this taste of magical energy by accessing the words that are bound to it. If the words are in Aramaic, that’s how you invoke it now. If they are in bad Latin, that’s how you invoke it. However, you can also do it directly, if you’re powerful enough; and she was. So, she would wield the magic that would normally be behind five different spells, with a single thought and spatial awareness, and she at first checked it, and had her mother check it again, and it was perfect. She didn’t tell mom why; just that she didn’t trust the new wand.

She didn’t know any wizard other than Voldemort and Dumbledore who could do it. There were certainly others; the original authors of the spells, for instance. But she felt fiercely proud of herself for learning this. She must tell Harry.

Another thing changed when she gifted her wand to Harry. It felt so intimate, it made her so vulnerable, so terrifying and satisfying at the same time, that she doesn’t understand how she even managed it. It was an instinct, but a terrifying instinct, because that wand guarded more than just her life, and she gave it to him willingly. It felt like taking off your clothes and going out into the bitter cold of winter. However, for some reason, she stayed warm. She had a weird feeling that, somehow, she conquered fear forever when she did that. She could always escape, she could always say no, she could always cling to some protection, or illusion thereof, but when she voluntarily gave it away, she felt as if fear no longer had power over her. And, weirdly, that she had power over fear. The formulation actually crossed her mind: you are a Mistress of Fear now. She felt as if Dumbledore was watching over her. Her eyes filled with tears; I wish I finished that talk with him. I wish he was here with me now.

She flicked her borrowed wand and removed the wards. Time to go back to carrying her cross, willingly.

She initially found it weird how she could keep her secrets without any Occlumency. She soon understood why; she was always terrified. Voldemort liked his people terrified. It made him feel powerful. When he felt what he expected and liked, he looked no further. All was as it should be. She was terrified, her mother was terrified, and her father was broken. Voldemort liked his people broken, so that, too was satisfying to him. The irony is, this protected them better than a white wall of proper Occlumency ever could – Voldemort would wonder what is there to hide, and investigate. But now, as he saw everything as it should be, he relished in his power over them and asked no questions.

She was under no illusion that she could beat Voldemort in a duel. Dumbledore could. Harry could hold his own, and almost won a few times. She could likely wipe out most Death Eaters. She could probably beat aunt Bella. Probably. But she practiced hard magic for three years as if her life depended on it, because it did, and there’s a thing about practice – it makes you good. And she was very, very good. She smiled. I can stand beside my husband and feel like I belong there. I will make him proud.

She was a lithe platinum blonde with silver eyes, his height, and she felt fast, energetic, dynamic, like lightning in a bottle. He was trying to remember her appearance now that he was in a tent in the woods and there was nothing immediate for him to do. Her beautiful face had a special something to it that he tried to describe. She looked fresh, clean, like fresh snow or fruit fresh from the orchard with dew still condensed on it. Why did she always look clean? He saw her with mud on her face, sweaty and dirty after a Quidditch match, and she looked clean. No, clean isn’t the right word. She looked pure. Pure in a sense that there is no mask, there is no play, there is no deception, that her emotions play on her face in ways that make you see straight into her soul. When she would use the word “pure”, he understood it in that terrible blood purity sense where they look down on muggle-borns and half-bloods, but now he knew that this was not how she understood it, not really. She understood it in a spiritual and moral sense, where purity was something you had to actively strive for. In order to be pure, she thought she needed to be honest, truthful, brave, respectful, smart, a good witch, loving, and honour traditions, parents and family. She didn’t tell him all that; he deduced. It was also obvious that she just repeated all that pureblood nonsense from her parents and believed it because she loved them and they can do no wrong, and when she saw Voldemort for herself, it all broke down.

He remembered the tower. She ambushed them. Dumbledore had him under his cloak, and had him body-locked when she came, and she disarmed Dumbledore with a spell. She was fast. What happened then was nothing like he expected. She lowered her wand, apologized to Dumbledore for disarming him, but she couldn’t risk not being allowed to say this. She lowered herself to her knees, looked him in the eyes and begged.

“Please, Headmaster, save us. We are prisoners in our own home. Terrible creatures roam our house and I am afraid of being violated or murdered every single moment. Thugs and werewolves. We live in constant fear. My father was foolish to put his faith in the Dark Lord, who is cruel and cares for nobody but himself. He’s a shell of his former self now, and my mother is trying to keep us alive and protect me, but we have no control, no safety, no hope. Please; you’re the world’s greatest wizard. Voldemort fears you. Please come and save us, I’m begging you. I have nobody else to turn to. I would already have killed myself if not for the fact that he would torture and kill my poor parents then. I agreed to this in order to buy them a year of relative safety, but now it’s all over. They will know that I never intended to harm you. Please, Headmaster.”

It was the most heartbreaking thing he ever saw or heard. He never saw her in tears before, with that clean, pure face that told the truth. He could never imagine that powerful, aristocratic, dignified girl on her knees. And what she told was horrible, but not beyond his knowledge. He saw through Voldemort’s eyes, he saw what it’s like there. He just didn’t connect the dots and understand what it’s like for a pure, innocent girl to live there.

Dumbledore got her back to her feet. “Please stand up, my child. I am so sorry. I already feel honoured to have been allowed to meet one of your kind, but the second one… I did not think it possible.”

She looked puzzled, as puzzled as he himself felt under the cloak, and started to ask what he meant by that, but then the Death Eaters came, and the air of noble civility and purity was lost, replaced with the horrors that now live in her home. And then Snape came and Harry never got to know what Dumbledore meant by that. He had some idea. Dumbledore told him that his soul possessed the full power of that force that’s kept always locked in the Ministry – love, as a magical power. He seems to have thought Lyra to be the second such being he met. It’s incredible how stupid I am, Harry thought. I completely misinterpreted her, and it was right in my face. The feeling of cleanliness that persisted even under mud. She would smell clean like a forest after rain. The way she carried herself. And he thought she was evil because she loved her parents the way he loved his own, and she believed what they told her the way he would have believed his own. None of that was her fault, and when she could verify what they told her, it was already too late.

He covered for her. Said she had nothing to do with the Death Eaters coming to school. She just happened to be there in the tower and wanted to talk to the Headmaster, which happened to be true, if we ignore the fact that she disarmed him. What she did there was exactly what he would have done; he would have found the way to speak to the headmaster alone and ask for help. She never really did anything wrong, and he was a fool. He now knew why she was angry at him. There were monsters in her home and she had to live in a horror show, and he was dating other girls and looking at her as if she were an enemy. Of course she was furious. She felt betrayed. She felt alone in the dark with horrors approaching and he was judging her and thinking how to stop her because she’s the enemy.

It was so easy to fear her. She looked like a terrible weapon – fast, powerful, smart, with intelligence behind those silver eyes that missed nothing and cut like a knife. With beauty that intimidated him because he felt in its power. With Death Eater ideology that came out whenever she opened her mouth. He was always too intimidated with what he felt she could do, to stop and think, and see what she actually is, and what she wants.

When she laid her soul bare before Dumbledore, he understood that she merely loved her parents, and her purity wasn’t some noble affectation; it was what she actually is. She’s pure love, and Dumbledore saw it. It’s just that the parents she loved filled her head with their beliefs, and she believed them because she was a child and she knew no better. If he were born to her parents, he would have been her – or worse, because it would be wrong to presume that he would have been as good a person as her.

When he confessed to her after the funeral, it was as if a dark cloud was removed from her face, and a light illuminated her from within, just from knowing now that he loves her. That transformation was the most beautiful thing he ever saw. But he couldn’t think about that now, because there’s that last horcrux to find, and a final battle to win, and he looked at the wand in his hand.

Her wand. They had to pretend he disarmed her, but she gave it to him. It felt like she gave her entire life to him: her power, her protection, safety, everything, trusting him to save her. It felt like nothing else in the entire world, and when he took that wand and its energy took a taste of him… it didn’t oppose him, like other wands he took opposed him and made it hard to do magic. This one didn’t exactly recognize him as its owner, but as the person its owner loved since she was a child, and thought of with every spell. Using the wand felt like falling in love. His eyes filled with tears.

He needs to focus. Any more of this and he’s going to get really distracted. Let’s get this done with.