“You know, the political landscape after the war ended up being completely different from what the Order of Phoenix would have expected”, Harry smiled at his wife. “They had a very black and white picture of reality in their heads, where they are the good guys and everything they believe and do is good and should prevail, while the other side are the bad guys and everything about them should be abolished and discarded. In reality, our long talks at school taught me that the other side is actually right in so many things, we should be very careful about ignoring those arguments”.

“And we ended up adopting a balanced policy that acknowledges good arguments from both sides”, she nodded. “Things like Hermione being considered a pureblood, or House Elves being considered family members”.

“And also the dangers of magical blood dilution and extinction being taken very seriously, and preservation of ancient tradition and family lineages being enshrined in state policy”, he smiled. “Rather than one of us recruiting the other to their side, we ended up teaching each other and adopting good ideas”.

“Oh, I definitely consider myself as having switched to your side when Voldemort returned”, she was serious.

“But when we divorced the Voldemort issue, dark magic issue and the pureblood issue, I think I adopted all of your good ideas and slightly modified them. I think the lesson is that when two intelligent people argue, it’s not realistic to expect that one side will be completely right and the other completely wrong. In fact, when I realised how smart you are and how well thought out your arguments were, I expected to outright lose every argument with you and that terrified me.”

“On the other hand, there were certain arguments I didn’t actually want to win. I was just afraid of what it would mean if I lost. For instance, the Voldemort thing. My parents were so intertwined with him, that it terrified me to think he might actually be evil, and I rather spent inordinate amounts of energy thinking of all sorts of rationalizations as to why he might actually be the good guy despite all evidence to the contrary. Because, if he were evil, what are my parents then? Should I not love them because they are objectively on the wrong side? The idea terrified me. In the end, even after my parents emotionally separated themselves from him, it was excruciatingly hard to save them while at the same time not raising attention to the fact that I’m on your side”, she grinned.

“That was a more terrifying situation than anything I ever experienced, and I had a piece of his soul in my head showing me evil things”, he nodded.

“I think the key point was the understanding that Voldemort hijacked the pureblood issue that was actually important to people. He also hijacked the issue of dark magic, which was sometimes actually useful and people objected to the fact that it was outright outlawed. When the two of you disentangled those two issues from Voldemort and the specific Death Eater ideology one could only embrace if they were a murderous lunatic like Bellatrix and other thugs, things became much simpler”, Hermione joined them. “When separated from the death cult of Voldemort, the other two issues became quite rational and even I had to accept most of the arguments, even when it put me personally in a vulnerable position”, she smiled.

“And when you chose to put yourself in a vulnerable position, I felt so protective that I lobbied for laws that would guard you”, Lyra took her hand and smiled.

“It’s hard to play the game of political extremism when you love people on the other side of the divide”, Harry nodded. “That’s why Lyra and I kept holding hands while arguing. It’s hard to make deliberately injurious arguments against the other side when that other side is somebody you care about. We looked more like lovers than enemies and I guess that’s what we were, if not for my thick head.”

“And it’s hard to argue categorically against dark magic when we ourselves had to use Crucio or Imperio in the war if we wanted to win”, Hermione was serious. “You had to separate intent from the means. Saying that dark magic is universally bad is like saying good people should only smile all the time.”

“Harry and I ended up not wanting to win an argument unless it made the other one happy. It was just not seen as a victory if the other side ends up feeling defeated, because that would hurt, a lot”, Lyra squeezed Hermione’s hand.

“And I decided that I may be a hamster, but at least I’m your hamster”, Hermione smiled at her friend, who pulled her sweater over her head and groaned in embarrassment.

“I will never live down that stupid insult”, Lyra let out a muffled whine.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, it was an insult in the beginning, and it hurt. But then, after the challenge in the hallways, I started paying attention and started seeing you for what you are, and the idea that you just might be such a wonderful person that I might actually feel like a pet next to you cured me of lots of my intellectual arrogance and egalitarianism. For the first time in my life, I looked at someone my age and was forced to accept that they are superior to me in every way, and it didn’t feel humiliating, it felt great”, Hermione touched her cheek to Lyra’s hand. “I was just miffed for not being allowed to be your friend, so when you approached me after the war, I was in hamster heaven”, she laughed, to Lyra’s enormous embarrassment.

“This storm is far from being over”, Hermione noted, reading her copy of the Daily Prophet over breakfast.

“What do they say”, Harry sipped his tea.

“People are praising the Aurors for standing up for their bosses, and mentioning how they gave Viktor a hero’s welcome after the interview with him came out. Also how they showered Lyra with rose petals when she came to work. There are comments from the readers – women are swooning over Viktor standing up for Lyra by threatening to duel anyone who says a word against her. If Ron wanted you to become the most popular people in the world, he did a good job”, she smiled.

“Anything about how Ron is doing?”, Viktor put down his half-finished croissant.

“Yes, in fact”, his wife smiled at him. “He was seen sleeping rough in Diagon Alley, before someone took him in, apparently. It’s not clear, but he tried with a dozen people, family and friends, and they all had him kiss the door. There are also articles from people remembering him being nasty before, but forgave him for being Harry Potter’s friend. They are writing an angle where he was in fact a pampered little prince who always got away with everything, while his friends had to work for everything. They say he betrayed his friends every time he thought it would benefit him, and they kept forgiving him. It appears to be a ‘hate Ron Weasley’ week”, she closed the newspaper.

“I think his problem is that he kept pulling off the same stunt, it always worked, and he never bothered to figure out why that is”, Lyra mused, wiping powdered sugar off her lips with a napkin. “It was like assuming air or gravity. It’s always there so why even think about it. Now that I think of it, he used to be almost as rude to Hermione as I was, initially, but somehow he was seen as cute and I was seen as evil incarnate and a devil child. He was taken in, while I was locked out. So, he never gave it a thought. That was how things worked. I, on the other hand, had to revise my whole life to see what I did wrong, why it was perceived the way it was, and I was on the bottom of a slippery pit trying to climb out, and people were glaring at me from the edge, ready to push me back in, because I seemed to be all the wrong things. Conversely, when he would stumble, multiple pairs of hands were always extended to get him back up. Sure, I was rich in terms of money, and he was the opposite, but he seems to have been rich in social capital he kept drawing on, not even realising it’s there, the way I never realised money was a thing until I saw people who didn’t have it. But I realised money was a thing when I was eleven. He literally never gave his social wealth a single thought, he never considered what an advantage he had by being born in the core of the Order of Phoenix, and what it would have been like to be born in a family of Death Eaters, what a pit that would be to climb out of. He just assumed things are the way they are, assumed that he deserved everything he had and perceived it as nothing, and complained about the things he didn’t have and all the expectations people have of him, as if that’s even a problem”, she finished.

“You’re right about that, and I actually never thought about it that way”, Hermione was lost in memories. “He did say all kinds of nasty things about me – how he hoped we didn’t get sorted in the same house, how I was pompous and annoying, imitated me mockingly and so on. He literally drove me to tears, and yet somehow it all got swept under the carpet when he and Harry helped me with that troll. He always cared more about his food than his friends, and his emotional spectrum consisted of being embarrassed and feeling sorry for himself. You, on the other hand, made one blunder and we just locked you out for years, until you did that ‘either kill me or treat me like a person’ thing in the hallways. That’s when we actually started seeing you as a human being and not just an evil Slytherin girl. You really did have a pit to climb out of in order to even be acknowledged. He, on the other hand, just was. People always saw him, cared about his feelings, forgave him for his stupid nonsense, and gave him the benefit of the doubt. I’m sorry to say this, but you were seen as hostile background noise. We should be feeling as guilty for treating you that way as you feel guilty for messing up, if not more.”

“That thing about invisible social capital that he kept relying on without noticing it is even a thing, that’s an excellent observation”, Viktor nodded. “I never thought about it that way”.

“People never do, until it’s gone”, Harry smiled. “They don’t notice having loving parents and just assume it’s normal. People just assumed I had to be a pampered kid, because how famous I was for no good reason. They assumed I had to be a spoiled brat, and treated me like one. They never stopped to think that I was famous for having my parents killed while I was a baby in the crib, and that I was brought up by the Dursleys who treated me like trash; that I was always hungry, wearing Dudley’s old clothes and sleeping in a broom cupboard under the stairs. They assumed that just because they had things, it was a given that others have it at least as good. In fact, the only people who actually felt me in that way were Neville and Luna, who had similar personal tragedies.”

“And I assumed that since I knew you were one of the wealthiest people in the world, that you had to know it, and it never dawned to me until much later that you never even knew about it until literally days ago. I would never have thought, in a million years, that you lived a life of abject poverty and neglect, and nobody ever told you they loved you”, Lyra’s eyes glistened. “I saw how you seemed to be offended by my very existence because I wore nice new clothes, and I thought you just hated me as a person; I never even realised that you think you’re a homeless orphan who has always been told he’s a burden. I was always told I’m a precious treasure and my parents’ love and pride was like air in which I moved. I couldn’t even comprehend what you went through. It was such an implicit assumption to me that everybody has it the same way, that I only started to turn my brain on when you completely locked me out because my very being was offensive to you”.

“I guess Ron was never made to reconsider the existence of air”, Viktor nodded. “I wonder how many other implicit assumptions we all hold, never thinking about them or knowing they are there until the floor comes out beneath our feet”.

“I know how shocked I was when Lyra confronted me. It was not just the shock of how she did it, but the shock of understanding that she might even want to. It was the realisation that she’s not just some rich moustache-twirling villain like Dick Dastardly or Cruella de Vil who is evil because she likes being evil, but an actual girl with feelings that can be hurt, and enough courage to give me a choice between respect and death. When I actually had to think about it, I realised I was a total jerk and I didn’t like the feeling”, Harry reminisced.

“Dick who?”, Viktor scratched his head.

“Old muggle cartoons”, his wife smiled and explained. “It’s an animated hand-drawn life-like thing. I’ll show you”.

“Show me too, I had no idea that even existed”, Lyra smiled.

“Yeah, that’s one of those implicit assumptions. I assume everybody knows what cartoons are”, Harry laughed.

“Arthur, what’s wrong?”, Molly looked at him with deep concern. “You barely said a word since you returned, and you’ve obviously been crying. What happened there?”

He looked at his wife, trying to find adequate words.

“Lyra is as old as Ron. If she were my daughter, she would be one of our youngest children. I always wondered if she and Harry are old and experienced enough to be the heads of the Auror office. After today, I think I can only see her as my senior, someone like Dumbledore or even greater. The question I have is no longer how someone so young can hold such an important office. It’s how a soul so vast can fit in a body so young, frail and pretty. She used a spell on me, you know.” He sighed deeply.

“What kind of a spell?” Molly was instantly alarmed.

“She opened her heart and shared her childhood memories with me. Seeing our children in rags, not being able to afford books and wands, signs of poverty, her crying in frustration after seeing it. The feeling of injustice that pureblood children suffer those humiliations needlessly. Her anger at me for allowing it, for not taking those lucrative promotions and treating my job as an extension of my obsession with all things muggle. It’s nothing I would have thought. It’s not hate, or contempt. She honestly believed pureblood wizards are a precious treasure and should be kings and queens in the world, and she thought her wealth was normal, it was because they are what they are as a family, and then she saw us and it was shocking, it hurt her soul so much to see purebloods living in poverty and it was such an injustice she would cry herself to sleep at nights thinking about it. And I saw her for what she is when she opened herself up to me. She is so vast, so pure, so innocent and so incredibly powerful that I just wept like a child for making such a person cry. It felt like making a perfect God cry.”

Molly just stood their with mouth open and couldn’t find words.

“She also shared some things about you, you know”, he tried for a smile. “She resents you for not allowing the kids to grow up, to be adults, for enabling Ron in his infantile behaviour so that you would have children to care for longer, giving yourself a purpose. Not wanting Bill to marry, thinking no woman could be good enough for him, no woman could replace mommy, and offending Fleur, whom she loves very much and thinks she’s a wonderful, good hearted lady with a bright mind. She showed me her perspective and I saw why Charlie, Bill and Percy, and even Fred and George, ran away from our suffocating atmosphere that attempts to suck their lives away and keep them children forever, and never allow any important issue to be touched because we become defensive and start accusing people of all sorts of things just to keep things as they are. She showed me everything she sees, and everything she feels, and the reasons why she feels it, and her mind is so pure, clean and powerful, it was like somebody expanded my soul a hundred times and I could suddenly grasp all of it. It’s absolutely amazing. I don’t know how a human being can even be that pure and vast. OK, I probably could imagine it if it were Dumbledore, but not a tiny girl who could be my daughter. And the worst thing is, the conclusions she makes are nothing like I would have expected. It’s mostly her own pain, frustration that she can’t make it better, that she can only observe and we don’t even allow her to tell us what she sees. I am in absolute awe of her, Molly”, his eyes glistened with tears and one dropped down his cheek. “And I’m not the only one. Viktor Krum was there and he watched it with his mouth open like you right now, and I could see it in his eyes how amazing he thinks she is. I would have dismissed it as nonsense, thinking that no human being can deserve such worship as the three of them shower her with, but now I think they are right. I used to wonder if she’s good enough for Harry; now I wonder if anyone is good enough for her.”

Molly’s eyes filled with tears. “Was I really trying to keep them from growing up because I wanted to be a mom forever and didn’t know what to do when they grow up and leave?”, she sniffed. “I felt some of that when Ginny threatened to leave and we threw Ron out for being a ghoul.”

“Lyra sees it that way, and honestly, seeing it in her heart it all makes sense and it looks as if I was shown the objective truth of it all after living in my own head with my own justifications for decades. It feels like waking up from a dream and understanding that I’m not the good guy that I thought I was”, he let out a broken sigh. “It all had a quality of God showing me the truth as it is”.

Molly just embraced him and they cried together.

“Arthur, I have to tell you something”, Lyra sighed. “Maybe it’s too late now that all your kids left the nest, or are about to, but I want to get this off my chest. However, I don’t want there to be a misunderstanding between us, and I want to show you what I actually think and feel. Will you allow me to show you?”, she asked him with her clear, open eyes. He gulped and nodded in assent.

She closed her eyes, touched her heart, pointed at his, and whispered. “Cordem Revelio.”

Arthurs eyes spread wide in surprise and shock, then closed, and tears started flowing down his face.

Viktor looked at them with eyes wide, feeling the echoes of the powerful magic, and seeing how she invoked it. He didn’t want to disrupt the sanctity of the moment, but he needed to learn this from her, if it were at all possible to learn.

Arthur was still sobbing, and Viktor wondered what she did to the man. He was old enough to have seen all kinds of things, and something that brought him to tears like that must have been quite something.

“I’m so sorry”, Arthur managed to form words, barely; he took Lyra’s hand and kissed it.

She smiled kindly. “Explain it to Viktor, please; he’s wondering what I did to you and I think it’s something he needs to hear”, she whispered.

Arthur managed to tear his eyes away from her and looked at Viktor. “She showed me how she used to cry from frustration as a little girl, looking at my children wearing rags and hand-me-downs, how Ron had to use someone else’s unsuitable, and later broken wand, because I played with spark plugs and other muggle toys instead of providing for my family properly. She showed me her pain and impotence and rage over my negligence as a father. I know why she didn’t want to tell me, because I would have misconstrued the words. I would never think, in a million years, that it hurt her feelings so deeply and personally to see my children’s poverty. She also showed me how she sees Molly, and her role in Ron’s downfall, by enabling dependency and discouraging independence and adulthood. I felt her enormous mind and heart in pain over all of this and it feels horrible, and I can’t deny that it’s all true, because she showed me her perspective, and it’s so much wider and more perceptive, deeper than mine, it’s amazing. It’s like seeing something from all sides, when you previously saw it only in your head. It’s one thing when her father berated me, because he did it with malice and it was easy for me to dismiss it as pure nastiness of a bad man, but I can’t dismiss her.” He wiped his tears away and took a deep breath to collect himself. “Thank you for showing me this, Lyra”.

She held his hand. “I wanted to show you that I’m not angry at you out of malice. I was angry at you because I couldn’t make you see, and I couldn’t make anything better, and it hurt me. Go now, and give my love to Molly and Ginny. This was hard for me too, and I have to rest now”, she sighed.

…

Hermione and Harry came together from office and saw the two of them sitting there, in deep thought.

“What happened?”, Hermione was slightly alarmed.

“I witnessed Lyra bringing Arthur Weasley to tears by showing him her heart, and I fully understand why you worship her. I used to merely love and admire her, but now I’m just awe-struck”, her husband smiled. “I think I will start calling her my goddess as well, because it feels appropriate”.

“Please don’t”, a tear glistened in Lyra’s eye. “It’s easy enough to get me emotional even without it, pregnancy and all”, she smiled.

Hermione just came to her and embraced her in silence.

“Auror office stands firmly behind their head couple”, Lyra read the headline and smiled. “Now I see why you were late for dinner”, she glowed at Viktor. “Thank you for defending us, that was very sweet of you”.

“It was very much my pleasure”, he smiled back.

It was not just him. His picture was posted prominently at the front page, promising grim consequences to slanderers and traitors, but there were other interviews, with very similar opinions expressed. Normally, Harry would be the head of the Auror department, but since the changes in law that Lyra initiated were in effect, married couples who worked together were considered teams, and as such, the position of the department head was shared between the two of them. This, in effect, doubled the performance of the office and produced such stellar results that everybody kept asking why nobody thought of it before.

“If I accepted half the drinks the guys at the office offered to buy me, they’d have to bring me home in a wheelbarrow”, he laughed. “As it turns out, they already considered transfiguring Ron into a toad, but they concluded this was even better”.

The door bell rang, and she closed her eyes briefly. “Kreacher.” The elf apparated with a crack. “Yes, Young Mistress?”

“Arthur Weasley is at the door. Please let him in”.

“You have to teach me how to do that”, Viktor looked at her pleadingly.

“Of course”, she smiled.

“Oh, there you are”, Arthur greeted them, and looked around. “I like what you did with the place. You kept the tradition and removed the dark stuff. Very cozy”, he nodded approvingly.

“Hello Arthur”, Lyra smiled and approached to greet him. “It’s nice to see you”.

“I have to apologise for Ron’s idiocy”, he looked at her sheepishly. “It was an incredibly nasty thing for him to do, and I honestly don’t even recognize him any more, how dark he’s become. Ginny was so annoyed with him that she threatened to leave the house, and when he started pointing nasty insults at her, Molly and I threw him out of the house”.

“I heard some of it from aunt Andromeda”, Lyra confirmed. “It’s about time he faced some consequences for his actions. He betrayed Harry multiple times before, and broke Hermione’s heart more than once, and some comeuppance was long overdue”, she nodded.

“He tried to move in with George, but George read the article and threatened to spray him with an instant pox powder from his store”, Arthur laughed. “I hear his attempts in other places didn’t go much better”. His eyes fell to Lyra’s forearm and he gasped. “The Dark Mark isn’t there. Not even the faint scar that was left on others. It’s like it didn’t exist at all”.

“Somebody finally noticed”, Lyra smiled. “I had to hide my forearms for the last month in the Manor. It vanished when I gave my wand to Harry and surrendered my only protection. Something changed – I think I felt Dumbledore’s presence and heard a sentence in my mind that I’m the Mistress of Fear now, and I didn’t know that the Dark Mark was gone until I had a shower that evening and looked. I think it had something to do with the Dark Mark being based on fear, and since fear could no longer command me…”, she shrugged. “Had anyone noticed, I would have been in trouble, but fortunately, it was early enough in the year and I could pull off long sleeves.”

“I’m going to kill Ron”, Arthur whispered.

“You should take a number, because there seems to be a line”, Viktor grinned. “Half the country wants to curse him, and the other half didn’t read the Daily Prophet”.

“I wonder if he’ll learn to feed himself now, or just crawl under some rock, be miserable and starve”, Lyra mused.

“That’s his problem now”, Arthur was firm. “He already had a job in the Auror department, immediately after the war, while you were back to school, but he quit after six months because he didn’t like the actual work and responsibility. Molly and I didn’t say anything but we weren’t thrilled either. Now that he made enemies of you and Harry, not to mention the rest of the office, I don’t suppose he’ll be welcome there either.”

“Oh, it would be quite easy for him to find work with his abilities. He would merely have to grow up and face responsibility”, she nodded.

“When that happens, we’ll have to check hell for snowballs”, Viktor laughed.