“Oh, you should hear all the gossip”, Andromeda snickered. “It’s delectable”.

Hermione rolled her eyes. “I can just imagine”. Lyra smiled into her tea.

“Actually, it’s all good”, the older woman smiled. “At first they were up in arms about it: your powers are a national security issue, you should not be in a position to decide. Then the Minister reminded them that it’s a national security issue that just happens to be in the hands of the person in charge of national security, to which their reaction was ‘Oh.’ What a surprise, the head of the Auror office happens to be the strongest human mage in the world, and has the audacity to restrict this knowledge to the Aurors she had personally vetted. When he put it that way, they started feeling like they were objecting to water for being wet, and then they decided to just rubber-stamp whatever you already did with the official seal of approval and call it a day. When they looked at it that way, they realised that you approached the issue in the most responsible way – you didn’t keep it to yourself, but you also taught it to only the most trustworthy people you happen to know, who actually need it to be better at their work as Aurors. So, essentially, you vetted the people who both actually need the knowledge and are most likely to use it responsibly”.

“I think they have the expectation that the person making such a breakthrough in magic should be an academic like Dumbledore, and not the woman in charge of security”, Hermione noted. “They expect the Head of the Auror Office to be a rugged grunt, not someone who is on the bleeding edge of magical theory and science”.

“And they wanted Dumbledore to be the Minister rather than the Headmaster at Hogwarts. Things never seem to match neither their expectations nor their wishes”, it was now Lyra’s turn to roll her eyes.

“They were terrified at the display of power obvious from the aftermath of Hermione’s… self defence”, Andromeda nodded. “They seemed to misunderstand when you showed them, Lyra. You were too subtle; take their wands and give them back. They didn’t understand the level of fine control that requires. Hermione putting the thugs through the juicer really demonstrated what this means. Then they were like ‘we should restrict who gets the access to this’, and then they realised how much ahead of them you are, and then they just decided to let you handle it because you obviously know what you’re doing”.

Hermione put down her glass of red juice and looked like she’s trying not to throw up.

“Too soon”, Lyra looked at Andromeda.

“What? Oh!”, she looked at Hermione and realised. “I’m sorry, sweetheart”, she rubbed Hermione’s knee. “I know this can’t have been easy for you”.

Hermione took a deep breath and shrugged. “The problem is, we didn’t get to question them. We don’t know if there were any stragglers. We established their identities with a reasonable degree of certainty, but it didn’t give us any useful information”.

“What Harry and Viktor surmised was that we need to have powerful fighters guarding the home at all times, because their estimate is that the most likely attack vector from people who would want us to reveal this magical method would be to kidnap our children and hold them for ransom”, Lyra noted. “I agree, and we already had some precedent”.

“You two truly married well”, Andromeda snickered. “Your men are wonderfully competent”.

…

“How many dragons do you think you could take in a fight?”, Viktor sipped his Porter.

“Well, that would depend… Are they Norwegian Ridgebacks or Hungarian Horntails?”, Harry laughed.