“I feel positively wonderful”, Hermione beamed at Lyra. “It was easier than the first one, and I really wish your mom’s recommended midwife was there to help us the first time”.

“The first time, our relationship was still… less than clear”, Lyra smiled back.

“You mean, they weren’t clear about the mudblood and their blood traitor daughter?”, she shook with suppressed laughter, and her newborn son stirred on her nipple. “Ow”.

“I think a milder version of that, but yes”, Lyra confirmed. “They were done with Voldemort for years at that point, but the blood purity thing was still an issue, and we were still under the old policy at that point”.

“I must admit that I never expected your parents to treat me with anything more than polite tolerance”, Hermione sighed. “This is such a nice change”.

“They saw that the two of us are like sisters, so they more-less adopted you”, Lyra smiled. “I think they realised that Harry and I are formulating a new future for the magical community, and they decided to trust us and follow our lead, because the old ways led them to the slippery edge of utter ruin. So, when we redefined the concept of pureblood to include you, they accepted it. If I see you as my sister, they see you as their daughter”.

“It feels wonderful”, Hermione closed her eyes and smiled wider. “I never felt so pampered in my life”.

“And we gave birth within a day from each other, which made both of us really vulnerable”, Lyra gently adjusted her newborn daughter’s position from the breast to her shoulder so that she could barf. “I didn’t expect both of us to be unable to take care of things at the same time”.

“I can’t believe we completely recovered within two days from childbirth. That treatment must have been really expensive”, Hermione mused. “No tearing, no belly, no stretch marks, as if we never gave birth”.

“Seven hundred galleons for the two of us. We got a discount since we were giving birth so close together”, Lyra whispered and laughed quietly, so as not to stir the baby.

“Merlin’s beard!”, Hermione’s eyes were wide. “I have to pay you back”.

“You are never paying anything back”, Lyra was adamant. “We don’t just live together. We’re family. Everything I have is yours. Hermione, when I was in the hardest, most vulnerable, desperate and hopeless situation in my life, you held my entire life and future in your hands. You were in a position where you could destroy me utterly with one word spoken to Harry, and you used this power you had over me to argue my case with him and give us your blessing. I owe you my life for that. It’s the kind of debt I could never repay, because it’s so big. Also, you forgave me for my rudeness and foolishness and chose to love me regardless. That’s another debt I can never repay. My life is yours”, she looked at her sister with complete sincerity, as Hermione’s eyes glistened with tears. “We have an almost endless fortune; not merely my dowry and Harry’s immense wealth, but also the Lestranges leaving me everything they owned in their will, and they all died in the final battle of the war. But even if we were poor and down to the last slice of bread, I would offer it to you first”.

…

“I don’t understand why we, and by that I mean the wizarding community, decided to emulate the Muggles in so many things, such as women having to emulate men in how they work; for instance, wasting the most fertile years on ‘career’ despite the fact that this could all wait just fine until our forties, or working apart from our husbands, or postponing marriage until later, and so on. None of this makes sense to me”, Lyra was exasperated. They had some peace and quiet with tea and biscuits, as the babies were sound asleep for a change, and the men were playing with James and Lily. “You’re the expert on muggles. Why did they decide to do it that way? I know we were fools to emulate them, but I can’t understand why they did it in the first place”.

Hermione smiled. “I actually looked into that, and it seems that until a few centuries ago, they lived what we would consider to be normal lives. Then they had something that’s called the industrial revolution, and it included people working boring, repetitive and often dangerous jobs away from home. That was the first part. Then happened something called the workers’ rights movement. It had multiple branches, the prominent being a philosophy called Marxism, named by its founder, Karl Marx. It postulated that every social interaction is based on exploitative economic relations, divided society into a dichotomy of the exploited and the exploitative classes, and recommended a violent revolution as a solution, where the exploited would appropriate the means of production and establish a dictatorship, and that would make everything better since it would put the exploited, and thus virtuous, class in power”.

“Did that actually happen?”, Lyra wondered. “I mean, the exploitation of the workers by the employers? And was the proposed solution actually implemented, and with what results?”

“It happened”, Hermione nodded. “It’s a generalization, to be sure, but whenever there’s an excess of labour and lack of work, the employers dictate the price of labour, and it invariably ends up being the lowest amount of money one could survive with. The unqualified workers, for instance the peasants whose land was bought for agricultural or industrial uses, and who had to move to the cities and find a way to survive, were particularly vulnerable. This is what Marx exploited for his propaganda. However, when the market conditions change, and when there’s a shortage of qualified workers, they end up dictating the price of labour and there were times when it was extremely high, and the employers couldn’t find their way around it. It’s a complicated balance of supply and demand, and if you want to harness people’s resentment, envy and anger, you take a selective reading of the market in certain conditions and present it as a universal reality that can only be solved by violent means. And yes, that was attempted, and it made everything so much worse. It created murderous revolutions where millions died for nothing, and in the end workers ended up being as poor as before, or worse, the rich people were killed, and their place was taken by the ideologues. It’s probably the only economic philosophy that was scientifically proven to be inaccurate”, Hermione smiled.

“I must admit it makes little sense. It’s like seeking employment at Borgin&Burkes, and then complaining that they earn most of the money produced by your labour and not acknowledging the fact that they had to build the business in the first place and have all the expenses and risks”, Lyra shrugged and sipped her tea. “But I don’t see how this all relates to our situation”.

“I was coming to that”, Hermione smiled. “You see, once you start viewing society through the lens of resentment, envy, exploitation and classes, everybody wants to be the righteous victim who will blame someone else for all their problems and eschew responsibility. So, invariably, a few women came out with a theory where they replaced workers with women and business owners with men and claimed that women, too, are an exploited class in society and should emancipate themselves from their fetters”.

“Was that true? Did the muggles truly abuse their women so much that they wanted to emancipate themselves from their men?”, Lyra’s eyes went wide.

“No. In fact, the muggles at that time lived very much like our family. Those women, who called themselves feminists, were laughed at, and other women organized counter-protests against them, with much greater popularity. The entire movement would have been an obscure footnote, if not for the wealthy business owners who realised they would profit immensely if women joined the workforce and competed with men. It would give them two workers for the price of one, by obvious laws of supply and demand. Also, the state was interested because it would make female labour taxable, and increase the gross domestic product, which would give the state backing for getting more into debt. The entire thing benefitted only the actual exploiters of people, and it harmed women and families the most, but since the big money stood behind the project and created lots of false propaganda, soon everybody believed that feminism rescued women from all kinds of oppression, while in fact women were previously treated very much like you and your mother were treated by your father”, Hermione nodded.

“My father loves my mother more than his life, and they both treated me with every form of kindness imaginable”, Lyra smiled. “That is, until he brought the Dark Lord and his minions into our ancestral home and made our life a hell”, she grinned.

“Exactly”, Hermione smiled back. “Feminists purported to solve a problem that didn’t exist, implemented it against everybody’s wishes, and when they created a widespread societal disaster, they claimed that they solved all sorts of imaginary forms of female enslavement and indignity, and that those criticising them are ungrateful”.

“And I guess when wizards and witches lived in their proximity, some of that rubbed off on us”, Lyra nodded. “I am understanding it better now. The Muggles adopted a problem pretending to be a solution, and we pretended to be completely separated from them, but that was never really true, other than a few villages and estates. For instance, 10 and 14 Grimmauld Place are inhabited by muggles. However, what I don’t understand is how they managed to convince people that the lower social classes are morally pure, while the upper classes are morally corrupt. I can see no way of arguing that case, because it can be easily argued that the lower classes simply lacked the means of oppressing others, and unless they are tested by being given those means to see what they will do, there is no way of knowing how virtuous they are. Likewise, not all wealthy people exploit others, nor are they morally corrupt”, she argued.

“That’s true, and you are an excellent example of an immensely wealthy, morally superior person”, Hermione smiled, as Lyra blushed. “As far as I can tell, you never did anything other than help, teach, protect and heal others, and you have only slightly less money and power than God”.

Lyra hid her face in Hermione’s hair and growled with embarrassment.

A baby woke up and started fussing. “Thank heavens for that mercy, because you’d have me crying in seconds”, she smiled. “Let’s go see who’s hungry, lonely or needs a diaper change”.

“Thank heavens for the Evanesco spell”, Hermione took the offered hand and got up.