Chapters 201-210

‘Magic is Might’—Redux

The office was all cleaned up. Not that Draco had ever really inhabited the room. He’d never brought any personal objects to work. There were no framed certificates of his OWLs or NEWTs, no pictures of his parents, aunt or little Teddy. Harry knew from visiting Andromeda that Draco had been the same there, too. His room had always been immaculate. But there’d been nothing in it to indicate that it was Draco who lived there. He wondered if Draco had been any different around Hannah.

Hannah. He really should go and visit her. She’d looked horrible at the funeral. And when he’d dropped in for a quick breakfast last week, she’d gone positively green just looking at his ham and eggs. Obviously, she was taking Draco’s death hard.

He sighed. But who wasn’t?

Harry slumped down on the chair, crossed his arms on the desk. He rested his forehead on his arms.

‘Oh, fuck, Draco,’ he mumbled. ‘How in hell shall I cope in this madhouse with you gone? I’m hopeless at politics!’

He blinked back tears, though he didn’t really know why: no one was here to witness his maudlin behaviour after all.

‘I wouldn’t precisely call you ‘hopeless’.’ Draco’s voice sounded wry. ‘And it looks like I’ll be around to help you cope. Now stop that whinging, Potter. It’s grating on my nerves.’

Harry jerked up his head and gasped at the silvery silhouette perched on the corner of the desk.

‘Oh, really, Potter,’ Draco drawled. ‘Have you never seen a ghost before?’

oooOooo

‘When did you plan to mention your encounter with that Muggle?’

Hermione startled and stared at her husband. Once more Severus stood in the doorway, scowl fixed, arms crossed.

She sat at her desk, a pile of essays long since graded in front of her. She’d been staring at Barret Cruddace’s essay about the Swelling Solution as if it held all the answers. Yet he’d barely scraped an A.

‘How do you know about that?’, she asked. Aurors, she thought and felt very foolish all of a sudden. I bet all of us have a secret body guard assigned to watch our every step. That’s why he gave in so easily when I wanted to go to London…

‘Unspeakables, actually,’ Severus said, suddenly relaxing his posture and stepping closer to her. He placed his hands on her shoulders. ‘If my suspicions are even remotely correct, this is not a job that Aurors can do anymore.’

‘It was a priest, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did the Unspeakables discover anything? Was he a part of that committee Umbridge was working with?’ She leant her head back against him. When she looked up at him, it was a strange angle: she only saw his chin and nose, framed by lank, black hair.

He shook his head. ‘No. But that doesn’t mean anything. They must expect us to search for them. They’d make sure there is nothing to be found.’

Hermione closed her eyes. ‘If the Church is responsible for all of this, do you think it’s official? I mean…’ She opened her eyes again. ‘…today, with all those political efforts to include very diverse groups into a multicultural, global society—if they tried to hunt us down—there are so many Muggle relatives of witches and wizards—don’t you think, if they went public…don’t you think that maybe Muggles…people…might come to accept us?’ She gave a small laugh, half bitter, half hysterical, as she imagined what would follow: ‘The magically challenged. Would we qualify for an anti-discrimination programme subsidised by the government?’

Severus moved away and sat down on the other side of the desk. For a long moment he remained silent. He stared at her intently, as if he was assessing her frame of mind, while he trailed his right index-finger over his thin lips.

‘Just answer two questions, Hermione. The first: what is magic?’

Her eyes widened and she opened her mouth only to snap it shut again. Such questions made her nervous, especially when he was asking them. Open-ended questions, where all answers could be wrong and right at the same time. Her heart pounded a little, as she mulled over the question. She wanted to give a good answer; the intelligent, insightful answer he obviously expected of her. At the same time she felt stunned. Such a simple question, and she couldn’t remember ever discussing it in class. Of course, philosophy of magic was bread and butter for the Unspeakables, so there might be a reason for this omission in the Hogwarts curriculum.

A talent. A very special talent.

‘We always knew that you had some very special talents.’ In retrospect she noticed how strained her father’s cheerfulness had been when he said that—and what the look he exchanged with her mother really meant: ‘Thank God, it’s only special talents. She’s not really…different. She’s not…handicapped.’ Hermione recalled what Lois had told her of Alina’s Muggle diagnosis. ADHD. Special talents indeed.

And an article she’d read: ‘While it is a common misconception that humans only use 10 percent or less of their brain, mysteries persist and we still don’t know exactly what the human brain is capable of…’

‘One man’s ‘magic’ is another man’s engineering,’ her father had become fond of quoting whenever she talked about magic at home. He had maintained that it was not so much a talent, or a different set of physical laws, but rather a different perspective, a unique and exceptional approach how to work with the laws of physics.

She shook her head. Valid aspects, certainly. But her reply should define the very core of magic, not different aspects in relation to physiology, or physics or…

Politics. The witch-hunts of the Middle Ages. The International Statute of Secrecy. The Pacta. Grindelwald’s slogan of ‘Magic is might’. Voldemort.

Hermione took a deep breath and met her husband’s black gaze.

‘Power,’ she said. ‘Magic is power.’