“How did you turn out so normal? I was in that place for only a few hours and I was at my limits. If that lasted for days, let alone years, I’d have gone insane”, Hermione rested after their practice session. The children were so exhausted from running and jumping at the floating lights that they fell asleep on the floor, and they had a peaceful moment now.

“I believe you, but you were actively tortured by aunt Bella, in the same way she mentally damaged Alice and Frank Longbottom to the point where they are permanently in St. Mungo’s and unaware of the world around them. I was at no point the target of their focused attention in that way, which was fortunate for me”, Lyra pointed out.

“But still; you’re so incredibly sorted out that you’re basically healing everybody and providing comfort, rather than being broken and in need of healing yourself. How did you even manage that?”

Lyra thought about it. “It was horrible. I still feel cold terror and start sweating when I visit that house. It is full of terrible memories for me. I wouldn’t look nearly as sorted out if I had to live there”, she smiled. “But to me, the actual terror was of a different kind. It started when Voldemort returned, I saw what a horrible person he was, I understood that my parents were wrong about him, and I returned to school to tell Harry, only to find him flirting with another girl”, she shrunk into herself a bit. “I understand now that I assumed all sort of things about our relationship he had no idea about, so he didn’t understand how that would affect me, but from my perspective… my life was over. I chose him when I was eleven. It could be only him. He looked at me with suspicion and fear thinking I sided with Voldemort now that he’s back, and he kissed another girl; he never kissed me like that. When I gave him a hateful look because he betrayed me, he took it as a confirmation, because argumentum ad Voldemort always seemed to hang between us”, she smiled, and wiped a tear off Hermione’s cheek. “For two years things were broken between us to the point where he ended up almost killing me”, she continued. “Those two years were the darkest in my life; I had Voldemort and his minions in my home, and they contributed to my despair and terror, but after Harry realised he loved me – and by the way I will be eternally in your debt for your role in this – and he told me he’s mine if I wanted him, it was as if a sun lit up in my heart again and I was whole, and I felt my life returning, I felt I had something to hope for, other than merely trying to keep my parents alive and surviving for their sake. My chosen life was back on track. I might not die as an old maid after all”, they both laughed through tears. “I was still terrified at home, but it was all external now, not terror feeding my inner despair and hopelessness. I understood what truly mattered, what I had to protect at all cost, and what I merely had to endure”, Lyra smiled like a small sun.

“So that’s what you meant by ‘nobody hurts what is mine’, after you wiped out those thugs”, Hermione realised.

“Yes”, Lyra nodded. “I realised that life isn’t time, or place, or things. It’s the people you love. Life is when you spend quality time with them, and everything else is just scenery and energy to power it. At the time I came to that realisation, my life were my parents and Harry. When my parents had a change of heart and allegiance about Voldemort, and Harry understood he loved me, the two parts of my life that tried to tear me apart came together to heal me. Voldemort, werewolves, death eaters – they were just scenery. Sure, they were the scenery of a Lovecraftian horror, and they still threatened everything I loved, but after my heart was healed, it was just an external threat. It was manageable. I still shivered in fear every time I had to pass through a dark corridor in my own home, and I would wake up screaming in terror from nightmares I had about what would happen if it came to the worst, and the absolute worst were those five minutes when Hagrid brought Harry from the woods, as dead. How I even survived that, I will never know. I was in a daze even when he stopped pretending to be dead and woke up properly only when Voldemort was dead. Then I realised that I lived life conditionally, until that moment. I expected us to die together more than I expected us to live together. I didn’t mind, as long as the ‘together’ part was there”, she smiled, and wiped both their tears now. “After all, I didn’t know if Voldemort could be defeated at all, now that Dumbledore was dead. I hoped, but it was a weak hope, easily defeated by reason. And then we went to talk, we both apologized for our respective roles in our misfortune, and he asked me to marry him, and I said yes”, she beamed. “From that point on, my soul was so thoroughly and profoundly healed, that nothing really bothers me, unless it threatens the people I love, but as you could see, I practiced magic a lot in case that happened”, she grinned. “And there was another thing that felt like deep healing: when I surrendered my virginity to Harry in our first night together after the wedding, and I felt such relief and happiness that it got to be him, and not some filthy creep Voldemort gifted me to, or that accursed werewolf raping me as prelude to eating me alive”, she shivered. “That fear was with me for years, and only at that point it felt finally resolved, and I got to live my life as I chose it”, her smile came back.

Hermione just hugged her, because there were no words.

“You know what I thought was the most frightening spell in the world, during those horrible three years of having Voldemort, death eaters and werewolves in my home?”, Lyra sat on the couch, hugging her knees.

“I’m afraid, with those people, the list would be extensive”, Viktor frowned, and Harry and Hermione seemed to agree.

“Expelliaramus”, Lyra whispered.

They all looked at each other, not understanding.

“Oh, it’s quite simple, in fact”, she nodded. “And it’s the reason Harry uses it in duels. Once you remove a wizard’s wand, the next spell can be whatever you want, and you can even take your time, because you’re no longer dealing with a wizard, you’re dealing with a muggle”, she explained. “Once the wand is out of your hand, the duel is over. The fight is over. Your bodily autonomy is over. Your life is over. My greatest fear was being disarmed from an ambush, being rendered helpless, and then having someone… take their time with me”, she shivered. “They were already making suggestions out loud. I didn’t even have to use my imagination”.

The rest of them felt as if the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. “Oh”.

“And you gave me your wand”, Harry whispered.

“Yes”, she smiled. “I did get some other wand, that didn’t like working for me very much, and then I thought, this is hardly better than having no wand at all, so why not try that”.

“How long did it take you to get it to work?”, Hermione wondered.

“Not long. Days. What actually helped is that the new wand processed everything with a delay and a reluctance, and I could feel individual steps being taken, now my command is being translated into the magical layer of the world, what it ends up being… and then I stopped telling it to the wand, and started telling it to the world itself”, she explained. “With my old wand, it would actually be much harder, with how eager it was to obey me”.

“Those must have been a terrible few days”, Viktor rubbed his chin. “Having a disobedient wand, not yet figuring out how to do it wandlessly, and all those horrible people roaming about”.

“One would think, but actually it gave me something else to think about, and they also had other things to think about, with Harry, Hermione and Ron breaking into Gringotts about that time. Nobody was giving me any thought”, she smiled. “And once I got it, I very quickly advanced from the basics to replicating everything I could do with a wand”.

“Also, a wand limits you to what you’re pointing at. When those five thugs surrounded me, my first thought was that I can’t deal with more than two of them in time the others will get me. From what I could see, wandlessly you just dealt with them all at once”, Hermione noted. “You need to teach me this”, she hugged her friend. “It makes me feel exposed to be the only one not to know it”.

“Well, technically, nobody knew it before Lyra figured it out, and you didn’t miss it then”, her husband pointed out.

“That’s true, but now that all of you know it, I feel I need to learn it quickly”, Hermione managed a weak smile.

“Tomorrow after breakfast”, Lyra nodded. “We’re all too tired now. Also, keep in mind that it’s more dangerous than using a wand. You put your wand away when you don’t mean to use it. You are also deliberate about where you point it. You can’t put your mind away when you’re not using it, and once you get accustomed to binding it to magic directly, you can’t allow your mind to wander aimlessly, or think too hard about something because you will make it happen”, she pointed out.

An orange levitated, peeled itself, separated into slices, the slices transformed into roses, assembled themselves into a bouquet, and fell into Hermione’s lap.

“Point taken”, Hermione giggled.

“Also, avoid messing with space geometry. That’s probably the easiest way to get yourself killed by accident”. She pointed in the air, and space suddenly looked like a cracked mirror, one shard showing Hogwarts main hall, the other Slytherin girls’ dormitory, another their office in the Ministry, and the final one showed Diagon Alley. She closed her eyes and the space healed.

The others looked at her with mouths agape. “Scary girl”, Harry smiled.

“What made you change your mind?”, Lyra asked her mother.

“It didn’t happen all at once”, Narcissa admitted. “The pureblood ideology was in my family for centuries before the Dark Lord. It was something that was just … true. But I think, when I saw the Dark Lord murder that poor, innocent woman that taught muggle studies at Hogwarts, Charity Burbage, and he did it in our home, in our drawing room, with all those gleeful monsters watching him feed her body to that accursed snake of his, something in me changed.”

“That was a terrible sight”, a shiver passed through Harry’s body. Narcissa looked at him, surprised. “You watched?”

“To my great misfortune, yes. I had visions through my scar. Terrible nightmares. This was one of them. I woke up in cold sweat with a terrible headache”, he reminisced.

“I woke up in cold sweat with terrible headache many following mornings, thanks to that memory”, she shivered. “This was such a terrible crime, that nothing could justify it. And it was done in such a terribly inhuman way, and the reactions of the monsters present were so vile and cruel, that a full realisation dawned upon me: we invited this horror into our home, and the only way for us to have any chance for a future of any kind is for the other side to win decisively”.

“But that’s merely the obvious part, the part about the Dark Lord”, Lucius interjected. “If only for that, we would be likely still espousing the same pureblood beliefs, because it was obvious that the Dark Lord espoused those beliefs only to deceive us and recruit us for his cause. But no – we saw again and again how the supposed purebloods acted as the vilest beasts without honour, grace, manners, dignity, purity or love in their hearts. I know you must have thought of us as cold, arrogant aristocrats, Harry, but beneath that public mask we loved our family dearly, and it terrified us that neither Voldemort nor his followers seemed to care about love in any way. They were only about murder, fear and service to the Dark Lord, and I am not sure they would ever have stopped killing and torturing people had you not ended it, for which we shall forever be in your debt”, Lucius looked at Harry with complete sincerity in his silver eyes, that were so much like Lyra’s.

Narcissa nodded. “We would look at each other, and try to imagine the end goal of all that, and all we could think of was a frightening, cold, evil nightmare with no end. And those supposed purebloods all felt like scum, villains, murderers and were barely human, if at all. When we compared them with that kind, good woman they murdered in our home, we understood that we would rather have her in our home than them, any time. We watched the people from the Order of Phoenix here and there, and it would break our hearts to see their love and kindness towards each other, something we haven’t properly felt since the Dark Lord took residence in our home and made it into a den of most the despicable villainy. We saw Harry and Lady Hermione, and they felt like proper people, not empty husks filled with dark evil, such as we kept seeing in our home. And somewhere, I don’t even know when exactly, it dawned upon us that purity of blood isn’t something you inherit; it must be something you manifest and live”, the lady sighed.

“And it helped when our daughter denounced us as blood traitors for having only one child, and then exposing her to those horrors and putting her life in danger. I never felt such shame in my life as when I watched her speak, and it was good for me because it woke me from my stupor and I couldn’t find anything untrue in it. I betrayed my blood and my heritage, as well as blood and heritage of my wife’s family, by preaching pureblood supremacy while not having more pureblood children to actually put my actions in alignment with my words, and I sided with a monster who considered gifting my daughter to some vile scum who served him the best in his evil. I was horrified at myself, and as I listened to my daughter’s words, I saw that everything she is saying is true”, Lucius looked at Lyra, who blushed.

“And when we saw how you and Harry honoured our family name and heritage, how wonderfully and respectfully your treated my childhood home, we decided to put our entire weight behind you without reservations. Not only have Harry and Hermione saved us all, but they also embraced our daughter as an equal and jointly formulated post-war policy with her, in such a balanced and reasonable way, that we would never have dared to hope for it. Where we feared you would tear down tradition, you preserved it, and only removed things that seem to have caused all this mischief in the first place”, Narcissa smiled at them.

“Did it not offend you that people like myself are now considered purebloods?”, Hermione asked shyly.

“Not at all”, Lucius was adamant. “Seeing you in our home, when you were brought in as prisoners, in contrast with the vile creatures that imprisoned us in our own home, made us revise everything we thought we knew about purity. I don’t know whether our daughter told you what we taught her?”, he looked at Harry and Hermione.

“I have a pretty good idea; we talked a lot, at school. She told me that to her, purity is a state of character – truthfulness, dignity, knowledge of tradition and history, respect for your ancestry, love for your parents, love for other pureblood wizards, strength of the community, and so on. I was very much surprised, because her beliefs seemed unique. Other Slytherins seemed to think it’s only about your parentage”, Harry nodded.

“Yes”, Lucius nodded. “That’s what we taught her and that’s how we acted within the confines of our home. So, when we saw you and Lady Hermione, you both looked like the embodiments of the principles of pureblood wizardry that we believed in, while the Dark Lord and his followers looked, to be honest, exactly like we imagined the mudbloods would look – no class, no honour, no love, no dignity, no respect, no love for their fellow wizards. So, accepting Lady Hermione as a pureblood witch was not just easy; it was the most natural conclusion of everything we saw. And seeing how wonderfully you arranged your household: preserving the tradition while removing the darkness, loving and respecting each other, bringing magic to hitherto unseen heights, increasing family wealth, supporting the community while dealing with threats decisively, we feel that our family heritage is in the right hands”, he bowed to all three of them. “Also, Arthur and Molly Weasley visited us this morning, and I honestly never believed I would witness anything of the sort. They sincerely apologised to us for judging us harshly and not taking our advice when it would have benefited them greatly. We were wordless, I admit. Truly, I believe you are ushering in a new era, and you are doing it both decisively and with tact and wisdom”.

“May I see Kreacher?”, Narcissa looked at Lyra, pleading, and her daughter smiled and nodded. Crack.

“Yes, Young Mistress? Mistress Cissa?”, he was surprised. “Kreacher is very happy to see you”, he bowed.

“Hello Kreacher”, Narcissa smiled softly. “Are you doing well?”

“Kreacher is very happy, happier than he had ever been in his long life”, he croaked. “Kreacher is family”.

Narcissa wiped a tear from her cheek. “I am sorry we didn’t treat you better before”, she sobbed. “I didn’t know better”.

“Mistress Cissa was always kind to old Kreacher. She has nothing to apologise for”, he touched her hand respectfully and disapparated, as Narcissa was struggling with tears.

“You took our family tradition, poured love and respect into it, and transformed it into something that makes me so proud of you”, she whispered.

“We buried the heads of the deceased house elves in the Black family crypt with full honours due to the members of the family”, Harry spoke. “And the portrait of the old Mistress as well, so she can now yell insults at her fellow dead”, he smiled.

“Truly, the place is improved by it immensely”, Narcissa smiled at him through her tears. “And I’m sorry I thought of you as an insolent boy before. You are wise, reasonable, balanced and respectful. Our previous discord was fully my own fault”.

“I understand”, he nodded. “And most, if not all, of any wisdom that I may possess, is due to your daughter’s beneficial influence”, he smiled at both her and Lyra, who squirmed with embarrassment.

“Liar”, she whispered.

“They are still going through it. Someone from the Ministry leaked that you’re pregnant as well, so there’s all sorts of an uproar, from how they could allow a pregnant woman to risk her life dealing with armed murderers, all the way to reminiscing about the official Malfoy-Potter pureblood doctrine”, Hermione smiled, turning the next page of the Daily Prophet and biting into a biscuit.

“Ladies and gentlemen, since the pureblood issue was central to multiple consecutive internecine wars in the wizarding community, my wife and I spent inordinate amounts of time, both in school and later, to figure out the solution, which I will now present for your consideration.

We defined pure magical blood biologically and scientifically, not traditionally or ideologically. By our agreed definition, a pureblood magical person is one that possesses magical ability and is able to produce magical, viable and reproductively capable offspring.

That’s all there is, and we decided that it is all that actually matters, since the crux of the issue was dilution of magical blood and the resulting extinction of magical humans, which we both agreed to be an outcome that needs to be avoided at all cost.

We decided that muggle-born wizards and witches should be considered of tentative blood status until their children are confirmed to be magical. At that point, their blood status should be revised to pureblood. A magical person who produces at least one non-magical child should have their status revised to half-blood. A magical person who produces only non-magical children should have their status as a magical person marked as non-heritable.

We came to the conclusion that marriages between magical and non-magical people should be discouraged, but not outlawed, since a certain percentage of non-magical blood might be necessary to protect against inbreeding due to a very shallow magical breeding pool. However, since it increases likelihood of dilution of magical blood and non-magical offspring, it should be strongly advised against.

On the other hand, magical offspring of non-magical people should be carefully observed, since they tend to be highly magical, like my mother, Lily Evans, who was a generational talent and an extraordinary witch, and my friend, Hermione Krum, née Granger, who is an incredibly talented person. The only question with such persons should be heritability of magic, and viability and reproductive ability of their offspring, but assuming all is well, their genetic diversity should be considered vital for the long-term genetic health of the magical community. Rather than being called derogatory slurs, their blood should be seen as the saving grace for our collective genetic health and an absolute treasure.

As heirs to the ancient magical families of Malfoy, Potter, Black and Peverell, and with additional endorsements from the families of Dumbledore, Krum, Longbottom, Prewett, Lovegood and Weasley, we offer this interpretation and recommend it to be enshrined as official policy and doctrine. Thank you for your attention.”

“Well, they are right that I should stop doing field work once my pregnancy advances enough, but that should be in six months or so, and I’ll be the first one to know when I need to relegate myself to a desk job, letting Harry make the headlines for a change”, Lyra smiled, buttering her croissant. “Also, Harry, you lied”, she grinned at her husband.

“Only a little”, he smiled back, sipping his tea.

“You told them I’m the significantly better fighter between the two of us. That’s completely untrue. We are very close to being completely equal; I can use a greater variety of wandless magic, and you can use more powerful magic under extreme conditions such as flying on a broom at lethal speeds. That by no means makes me significantly better”, she pointed out.

“I wanted you to get due credit, for a change”, he grinned. “After all, you made a critical breakthrough in magic, and then taught me how to do it. You literally held my hand through it, and I thought you should be publicly praised for your achievement”.

“Thank you”, she glowed. “But you still lied”.

“I’ll be sure to mention it in my next confession”, he grinned.

“Considering you don’t go to church, that will be never”, she snickered.

“Exactly”, he agreed and kissed her hand. “Also, it’s tactically useful to be underestimated”.

“The two of you are scary”, Viktor pointed out, as Hermione giggled.

“You have to teach me wandless magic too, I feel like a neglected orphan here”, she smiled.

“Next time we’re playing with the kids. They keep asking for glowy lights”, Lyra giggled.

“I feel like a such a horrible hypocrite”, Arthur pulled his fingers through his hair. “I was so incredibly self-righteous about judging people for having family members who are Death Eaters or dark mages or muggle-haters or pureblood supremacists. I used to automatically judge Lyra for having parents who served Voldemort. And here I am now, having just buried a son who was as bad as any Death Eater, completely evil and rotten. I thought I didn’t even need to see that recording, but I did, and it managed to be worse than anything I imagined. He was as bad as Dolohov or Macnair. I’ve seen the looks people have been giving me, and it’s the same looks I’ve been giving people with evil family members before, not thinking anything of it. They must have done something or be guilty of something, by association. It runs in the family. An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I disgust myself”, he wiped a tear from his face.

“It’s healthy. It’s part of the healing process”, Lyra approached and hugged him. “I was there, I know. When Voldemort returned and I understood he’s pure evil, and my parents bet everything on him twice, I felt so ashamed of myself for blindly trusting them and offending people by repeating the nonsense I heard from them. It’s hard, it hurts, but it has to be done”, she whispered into his ear. “Self-righteousness is a horrible drug, and it hurts to wean yourself off it.”

“The worst thing is, I can’t just hate him for what he became. I also remember the good things, how he stood with Harry and Hermione, how they destroyed the Horcruxes, how proud I was when he became an Auror. I loved him so much and I grieve for that part of him, and I blame him for killing it, for becoming that murderous scum that Lyra finally rid us all off, and I grieve because he never got the chance to repent, to come back, become that good boy again”, he sobbed.

Everybody in the Burrow looked down, obviously sharing similar feelings. Healing is going to be hard. People who resented him for his ugly behaviour felt both vindicated and guilty for their feelings. People who loved him felt guilty for loving him. They didn’t know how to deal with it, and it will require careful, slow disentanglement and analysis, Lyra thought. She exchanged a look with Harry, and saw that he had the same thoughts. Hermione, too, was distraught, obviously reminiscing about the good days and being unable to reconcile it with the recent developments, grieving and sad and guilty. Ginny looked like she was crying recently; she’s obviously feeling guilty about honestly hating what he became and wishing him to die or go away. Molly was crushed and wordless, but it was obvious that Arthur spoke for both of them.

…

“It’s good that they put it into words”, Lyra kicked her shoes off as she made herself comfortable on her favourite couch. “It makes healing easier. So much of our personal history is intertwined with him, and most of it was good memories. We can’t just lock those away.”

“It would destroy our hearts if we did that”, Hermione whispered. “Half of my memories would go dark if I tried. And if I embrace the good, I’m afraid I’ll open myself up to that horrible evil that I felt from him in the end, and I don’t know how to reconcile those feelings”, she sniffed.

“We buried the evil today. It ended. But the good remains part of us forever”, Harry nodded. “It’s just that now, we no longer have to feel guilty for perceiving parts of that evil as it asserted its dominance over his soul over the years, and eventually overcame him”.

“I think that’s a good way of looking at it”, Lyra nodded. “The good existed, it partook in our lives, but the evil also existed, rose up occasionally, and eventually won, as he abandoned the good part of himself that shared our lives. He chose parts of himself he wanted to be, and we can keep parts of him that we want to keep. They no longer share a person.”

“Thank you both”, Hermione looked at Lyra and Harry. “It actually helps when you put it into words that way. It makes it granular, doesn’t force me to either accept all of him or reject all of him. I can look at each memory individually, and be relaxed and secure about dealing with it”.

“Now you made me feel guilty for having no good thoughts or memories of him, and just being very glad that the bastard who tried to slander and later kill my wife is finally dead”, Viktor grinned.

“Don’t be”, Hermione smiled. “You’re in a much healthier place than we are, but I hope we’ll all join you there in a few days, if not in the morning already”.

“I’m going to get something to eat, and you can join me in that immediately, to hasten the process”, he smiled back.

“Is there anything fresh there? I’m starving”, Lyra gave him a mischievous grin, and went to raid the kitchen with him.

Harry and Hermione exchanged a look, and burst into laughter. “I envy them so much”, he smiled as he stood up and offered her a hand. “I hear that biscuits with some butter do wonders against overcomplicating your life by trying to save people who don’t want to be saved”.

“Milk, not tea. It’s too late for caffeine”, she beamed and took his hand.

“Honestly, I regret Lyra not being the third person in our group from the beginning”, he mused as they went to the kitchen where she was slicing jamón ibérico very thinly for herself and Viktor.

“You have a point there”, Hermione agreed. “How was she even not sorted into Gryffindor, with her heart?”

“I asked the hat to sort me into Slytherin because my parents told me it was the best house”, Lyra spoke with mouth full of ham sandwich. “It was one of their less brilliant pieces of advice”.

“Well, at least we sorted ourselves into the same house later, so it all ended well”, Harry grinned and started stuffing his plate with food.