October 2013 — Hogsmeade
The Three Broomsticks went quiet when Harry Potter walked in, the way it always did now, a hush moving through the room like a draught under a door.
It was involuntary. Nobody in the pub had consciously decided to do it. For years they had stared at him because of a lightning bolt scar and a defeated Dark Lord. Now they stared at him because they had all watched the international news feeds of a man on a broomstick casually blowing an armored alien warship out of the sky above the Thames.
The awe had evolved. It was starting to look like the way people used to stare at Dumbledore.
Harry had stopped fighting the stares years ago. Madam Rosmerta also helped solve the problem, with a side door, a back room, and a standing order of butterbeer, and she solved it again now with a jerk of her chin toward the curtain.
By the time the front room remembered how to breathe and talk again, Harry was already through the curtain, hanging his cloak on the hook that had quietly become his.
The back room had a fire, one window onto the lane, and a table scarred by years of celebrations. It was, Harry had decided, one of his favorite rooms in Britain, chiefly because it was one of the very few places left where he could simply sit.
The side door opened ten minutes later, which meant Rosmerta liked her too.
Hermione Granger-Krum came in out of the October cold.
There had been a time when that surname would have surprised everybody, including Hermione herself. Half the school had run bets on who she'd end up with, and the favorites had always been Harry and Ron, in roughly that order.
Neither of them had ever come close.
Without a grueling Horcrux hunt or a dramatic Ministry takeover forcing them together in a tent for a year, the three of them had simply grown into ordinary adults. Harry had spent his sixth year training under Sirius until his hands blistered, and somewhere in the middle of it he had started branching out, making friends outside the usual two. The famous trio had loosened without anyone noticing it happening. And without Harry there as the constant glue holding them together, Ron and Hermione worked out on their own that they made far better friends than anything more.
Ron had happily taken up with Lavender Brown in sixth year and, to the surprise of everyone except Lavender, never let go. Married now, two kids, thriving beside the twins at the shop. Hermione had reconnected with Viktor and found a man who admired her mind without ever once feeling measured against it.
The war they had all been born for never came for them. The friendship came anyway, and stayed. The three of them still closed down the Leaky every few months, still finished each other's arguments, and still fought about Quidditch and schoolwork, except that the Quidditch and the schoolwork belonged to their children now, which had somehow made the fighting worse.
Hermione dropped a heavy briefcase onto an empty chair, slumped into the seat across from Harry, and rubbed her tired eyes with the heels of her hands.
"Tell me you already ordered," she groaned.
"Butterbeer, spiked," Harry said, pushing a steaming tankard across the table. "And a plate of chips. You look terrible, Hermione."
"I feel terrible. I feel like I've spent three weeks reliving my final NEWTs." She took a long, desperate drink from the tankard and exhaled sharply. "Thank you. I needed this."
Harry smiled fondly. He knew exactly what was wearing her down.
When Amelia Bones resigned the previous year, the political landscape of the Ministry shifted overnight. The old pureblood families swept back in like a rising tide, and Hermione, despite her brilliance and her rapid climb through the Department of Magical Law, had been an immediate target. Within a week of Amelia's departure they had quietly demoted her to the Office of Ledger Standardization, burying her in a basement to regulate column widths on parchment inventory forms.
Harry had offered to speak to the new Minister. He knew one word from him would have reversed the transfer out of sheer terror. But Hermione had stubbornly refused. She didn't want her career maintained by the threat of a friend's staff.
Then Geneva happened. The treaty mandated a Muggle Liaison Office in every capital, and the Ministry panicked, because suddenly it needed a Muggle-born face to sit behind that desk and reassure the ICW and the mundane governments. So they dug Hermione out of the ledger room and threw her directly into the fire.
"Is Viktor still in Nagoya?" Harry asked.
"Until the new year. He's found a fifteen-year-old Seeker he says flies like a falling angel, so I've lost him completely." She rolled her eyes. "He asks after you, by the way. Wants a rematch."
"He was beaten cleanly by a middle-aged Defence professor on a school broom. There's no rematch from that. There's only shame."
"That is word for word what I told him." She stole a chip. "How are the children?"
"Loud. In the good way. And Susan's running the school governors in circles and enjoying it far more than she'll ever admit to me."
"And mine? The truth, please. Not the parent-teacher version."
"Mila's top of her year in Charms and has started correcting the textbook in the margins." Harry grinned. "Excelling. Exactly like her mother, and exactly as alarming about it. And Anton made the Quidditch reserves, which Viktor already knows, because Anton wrote to him before the announcement was official."
Hermione tried very hard not to look pleased, and failed at it completely.
Rosmerta came through with a stew nobody had ordered, said "on the house, don't argue," and was gone again before either of them could.
For a while they just ate, the way old friends can, without needing the silence explained or filled.
Then Harry set down his spoon.
"Go on, then. How bad is it out there?"
She gave him a look over the butterbeer. It was an old look, one he'd been receiving since 1991, and it meant do you want the real answer or the polite one.
He answered it the way he always had. He simply waited.
Hermione's fleeting smile vanished. She took another long drink.
"The liaison offices are an illusion of progress, Harry," she said bitterly. "The Ministry treats the Geneva Accord like a passing flu they just need to wait out. My job right now is basically what Professor McGonagall used to do for us. I meet terrified Muggle-born parents, I introduce them to the magical world, and I hand them a stack of glossy, Ministry-approved pamphlets." She set the tankard down. "That's it. That's the whole department. Every single policy proposal I send up the chain about actual integration, actual cooperation, gets filed in a drawer and forgotten before I've walked back to the lift."
"Did you honestly expect anything else?"
"No. But one could hope." Her mouth twisted. "And the Ministry needs to change, Harry. Not for the principle of it. Because of what's coming through my front door."
Harry set his cup down. "What's coming through your door?"
"The visitors have changed."
"Changed how?"
"For the first few months it was lovely." She said it without irony, which was somehow worse. "Curious Muggles. Reporters. Schoolteachers. Everybody wanting a tour of Diagon Alley, and we'd turn them down politely and hand them the standard public relations material and they'd go away perfectly happy."
She lowered her voice.
"Now... different people come in. And they ask specific questions. Uncomfortable ones. Somebody wanted to know exactly what part wizards played in the Second World War. Axis or Allies. He had a folder with him, Harry, and he'd done the reading." She turned the tankard slowly on the table. "Then last Tuesday a widow sat down across my desk. Her husband had died in a tragic car crash. She demanded that I prove to her that no wizard had cast a spell to make the other driver drowsy."
"Could you?"
"We did. Aurors and their police both investigated it thoroughly. They signed off on it. Three days of exhaustive work." Her mouth tightened. "She took the file and thanked me and left, and I watched her not believe a single word of it on the way out the door. She never will." Hermione looked up. "And that's the part nobody upstairs understands. We solve them. Every time. It doesn't matter. The number of paranoid visits goes up every week regardless."
"Somebody stirring it?"
"That's the part that has me worried." She set the tankard down and folded her hands around it. "Because I think so. And I can't find them."
"You? You looked and found nothing?"
"I looked properly." A tired breath. "But their technology has made hiding effortless in a way we never had to learn. Someone can sit on the other side of an ocean and play with the feelings of people standing in my waiting room, and leave nothing behind that anybody can point at."
"Can't their governments help?"
"No. Even they are helpless right now." Hermione shook her head. "Whoever is pulling the strings knows how to hide from both sides of the wall."
Harry frowned. "So the concessions weren't enough for them. Geneva wasn't enough."
"It looks to me as though they never wanted concessions at all." She said it flatly. "They wanted a war. They didn't get one, and people like that don't pack up and go home over a piece of parchment. They wait." She looked at him. "They're waiting patiently for a crack."
The fire popped in the grate.
Harry looked into his cup for a long moment.
"You know," he said at last, "you're the second person this month to ruin my optimism. Firenze got there first."
"Firenze? The centaur?"
"He came up to the castle three weeks ago. Walked right up to the gates, which he never does, and asked for me." Harry turned the cup in his hands. "Told me bad times were coming. Wanted me to be ready."
And Hermione, tired and frightened, actually laughed.
"Divination, Harry? You're seriously bringing me divination right now? I have actual intelligence assessments turning my hair grey, and you're offering me warnings from the stars."
"Mock all you like, Hermione. You and I both know for a fact that prophecies are real." He said it without any heat at all. "My entire childhood ran on one. Forgive me if I don't laugh at them the way you do."
"All right." The smile died, and she sat up straighter. "All right, that's fair. I'll take it seriously. Don't get moody at me."
"I'm not being moody."
"You're being extremely moody. Just say it. Exactly as he said it."
Harry recited it effortlessly. He didn't need to check any parchment. He had laid awake and read the exact words in his mind every night for three weeks.
"Mars burns unnatural, blinding the lesser lights. Nine wanderers come to one meeting. The walls between the worlds break. What slept in the dark wakes to take the light. A spark falls onto a house divided. The ink runs before the flame reaches it. The hidden dark rises. What the sky spares, the ground will finish."
Hermione had her wand out before he finished. The words wrote themselves in soft gold letters in the air above the table, and she read them the way she read everything. Twice. The second time with a quill's patience.
"Nine wanderers," she murmured. "Wanderers. That's the old word, Harry. Planētes. It's where the whole term comes from. Planets. The lights that move against the fixed ones." Her finger stopped beneath the second line. "Nine of them, coming to one meeting."
"Meaning what?"
"I have absolutely no idea."
Harry blinked. "Well, that's a first."
"That's the honest answer, and you'll take it and be grateful." She sat back. "Nine planets converging. What am I supposed to do with that? Are we being invaded by nine worlds at once? Because if so I'd like to formally register that as unfair." Her finger moved down the glowing lines. "And what slept in the dark wakes to take the light makes even less sense than the planets do." She looked at him over the top of the words. "Without context this is all just guesswork, and I refuse to guess at something like this in a pub."
"That's roughly where I got to."
"Then, did you go to Arthur?"
"Last week."
"Thank goodness." Some of the tension went out of her shoulders. "What did he say? Did he already know?"
"He listened to the whole thing without interrupting once, which he never does." Harry turned the cup again. "Then he nodded and said yes, some serious trouble was coming. And no, I shouldn't worry about it."
Hermione's hand stopped halfway to her drink. "Just like that?"
"Just like that."
"Harry, that isn't—"
"I pushed him." Harry allowed himself half a smile. "He said the first half of it is Asgard's problem. Thor's mess, in his exact words. He said the thunder god can clean his own backyard."
Hermione went very still.
"Asgard," she breathed.
"That's what he said."
"Asgard. Nine realms." Her eyes had unfocused, tracking something along a shelf that wasn't there. "The Convergence. There's an ancient Norse alignment myth, the nine realms coming perfectly into a line, it's in all the old texts..." She stopped dead, her eyes widening. "But Asgard is real now. Which means it was never just mythology at all. It was a literal map."
"Apparently so."
"And he just told you not to worry about it?"
"He said Thor will handle it. Said if it spills over onto our lawn, he'll deal with it himself. And he promised he'll call me if the situation ever requires a staff-wielding professor."
"Something ancient is stirring in the dark and the walls between the worlds are breaking. Asgard level powers." Hermione's voice was very flat. "That sounds dangerous, Harry."
"I said that. He agreed with me. Said it was extremely dangerous, and then he casually said it was above our league. And he said it in the same casual, bored tone he uses for absolutely everything."
"So that's it." She spread her hands. "We just sit here and watch?"
"That's it. Unless something totally unexpected happens."
"You've known Arthur for how long now? Nineteen years?" Hermione raised an eyebrow. "Has anything he's ever been involved in not gone exactly the way he wanted it to?"
"No," Harry said. "Which is exactly why I'm here and not stressing in bed."
She laughed, briefly and without much in it, and drank.
"Fine. Then the first half is handled by a god." She waved a hand at the gold letters still hanging in the air. "Which leaves the rest. Did Arthur say what any of that meant?"
"He didn't." Harry sat back, his face grim. "He said there was absolutely no point wasting our time worrying about it. He said trying to stop a prophecy is usually what makes it happen in the first place, and then he happily reminded me what Dumbledore's careful planning did for my life." He shook his head. "He said live life as it is. Handle the trouble when it actually knocks on the door."
Hermione studied him for a moment.
"Then why the long face?" she asked quietly. "If the man who could casually fight gods isn't worried about it, why are you sitting here looking so gloomy?"
Harry looked at the window, at the lane going blue with evening, at the far towers of the castle holding the last of the light.
"Because I think I know what the second half means," he said. "And I understand why Arthur deliberately didn't talk about it."
"Go on."
"Last year the sky fell. Everyone called it a catastrophe, and it was. People died." He turned back to her. "But it gave us something we'd never had, which was a common enemy. For about a month afterward, wizards and Muggles were pointed in the same direction. Arthur says that month was the closest the two worlds have ever come to actually joining hands. It slipped. But it was there, and I saw it."
"And now?"
"Now everything is cracked right down the middle again. Two worlds, one treaty made of spellotape, and our patient friends in the shadows going door to door looking for exactly the sort of crack you've spent the last hour describing to me." His hands went flat on the table. "So... the walls break, and something terrible comes through. Another invasion. Another enemy nobody on this planet has ever heard of. And by every sane reading of history, that should push the two worlds closer. It did last time. A common enemy is the only thing that's ever worked on us."
He shook his head slowly.
"But I've sat with it for three weeks, Hermione, and I simply can't make myself believe it will work again. Not now. Not with the state we're in. I think it goes the other way. I think it's the spark."
"A spark falls onto a house divided," Hermione repeated, reading the glowing words. "It fits perfectly."
"So no," Harry said. "I'm not frightened of whatever alien monster is on the other side of that wall. Arthur can easily have it. He's welcome to it."
"And Arthur knew you'd land here." She was still looking at the table. "He knew, and he didn't say it, because there's nothing to do with it. He can point a hand at a monster. He can't point one at two frightened worlds and make them hold still."
"That's where I got to about a week in."
Harry looked at her across the table, and his green eyes were tired and clear and a good deal older than thirty-three.
"I'm not frightened of whatever's coming through that wall, Hermione." He said it quietly. "I'm frightened of us."