Three Seasons to Closure

Chapter 10. An Extraordinary Idea

Hermione tossed a satchel onto the large metal desk in her office and flopped down into her chair. It was early on a Tuesday morning and she was eager to plow her way through ten rolls of parchment worth of analytical data that her two interns had eagerly collected on the previous day. To Hermione Granger, reducing data was always a bit more like eating a delicious meal than working. Planning the work, purchasing equipment and ingredients, carrying out the painfully methodical experiments were all just the meat and potatoes of her job. The gravy - that would always be found in little rolls of parchment like the ones she had neatly stacked before her.

For three years now, Hermione had been working with her colleagues to try and find new techniques to help with some of the more difficult patient cases at the Ministry of Magic's research hospital. On the third floor of this institute, which was located nearby in Ireland, there were a dozen rooms occupied by wizards and witches and even a Muggle, who presented such strange symptoms that they were never able to be diagnosed. Without diagnosis, the healers and mediwitches could only ease pain and suffering as best as they could; there would be no hope of curing these unfortunates. Dr. Hughes, Hermione's mentor, had made it his life's work to come up with new and better ways to diagnose magical maladies, and this summer he and Hermione had successfully obtained funding from the Ministry of Magic to carry out a series of newt studies, designed to assess the feasibility of an idea that they had formed together - one that held a great deal of promise.

"Are you licking your lips?"

Hermione started. She had heard a mocking male voice that sounded like it came from her large, ornate office fireplace - which was almost never used.

"Ha...Harry?" she asked, feeling a bit bewildered. It couldn't be Harry, could it? To Hermione's knowledge, only ministry research staff had access to the building's Floo network, and since they all worked on the same floor of the same building, no one ever used the thing. Also, it just wasn't dignified to be seen kneeling on the floor of your office with your backside sticking up in the air, head full of soot.

"Yes," Harry replied through the Floo connection, "it's me. Did I interrupt? It looked a bit like you were getting ready to eat your letters."

"These aren't letters," Hermione said, scowling playfully, "and how did you get on the Floo network in here?"

Harry grinned. "Some secrets, us Aurors like to keep to ourselves. Let's just say that I discovered a little bit about breaking into Floo networks over the years. Anyway, I can get back to you later. I see that you are still eyeing those letters."

"No, please, come on over - I expect that you are able to Floo in as well?" Hermione asked, smiling at Harry's boyish exuberance. He looked adorable to her, dressed in his warn and sturdy Auror robes and sneaking about ministry Floo networks to pay her a visit. Harry gave a quick nod, and within seconds unfolded out of the fire and walked over to Hermione's desk, taking in his new surroundings. He brushed a small cloud of grey soot from his robes and picked up one of the rolls of parchment.

"Harry, put that down!" Hermione scolded. "These are not letters, they contain data!" She gestured for Harry to have a seat across from her desk and fiddled with the remaining scrolls, piling them neatly into a pyramid in front of herself. "And, if you must know," she continued, "these are the exact data that I had been anticipating all summer. It's from the new project Dr. Hughes and I were awarded funding for." She smiled. "Remember, I told you about it?"

"Oh, right," said Harry, taking a seat and rolling the scroll of data between his fingers, examining it. "So... what is it, exactly?"

"It's a collection of individual magical signatures, taken from newts," Hermione replied, gushing slightly. She couldn't help but feel boastful - those scrolls of data represented something very new and exciting in her field. There wasn't another set like them in the world.

"And... what are they for?" Harry asked, smiling.

He was teasing, Hermione knew, baiting her into going on about her work so that he could make fun of her exuberance. She thought about just telling Harry that the signature data were really nothing, and releasing him from the obligatory "work" discussion, but she just couldn't force her mouth to form the words. The scrolls had only been in her possession for an hour, and she'd had no one to discuss them with yet. Dr. Hughes was away at a conference and the rest of her colleagues hadn't arrived for work yet. She looked up at Harry apologetically. Here, she thought, sat a captive audience for her, even if he did look quite formidable in his black robes marred with burns and tears.

"We have patients, over at the institute," she explained, "with unique, undiagnosable illnesses. It's generally thought that they may be victims of more than one curse - maybe many curses. If a witch or wizard, for example, was involved in a battle, and was hit with five or six curses within a very short time, those curses can interfere with each other, and can cause an unimaginable number of previously unseen maladies." Hermione paused and gave Harry an affectionate grimace. "We see this with Aurors sometimes, I'm afraid."

"Mmm," Harry said, nodding politely and rubbing his thumb thoughtfully over the tight little bundle of parchment he was still holding.

"We've been working..." Hermione began but then paused briefly, looking like she was restraining herself from licking her lips again, "on examining curious patterns that we've found within the victim's own magical signature - imprints, if you will. These imprints are remnants of recent curses. We've determined by examining old patient data that these imprints can be evident in an individual's magical signature for up to three or four years after the spell has been used. After then the imprints seem to fade and become too weak for us to decipher cleanly."

"And you can find evidence of each spell?" Harry asked.

"Sort of, we can't necessarily identify the spell, but we can identify the spell caster - and whether there are more than one. That's the goal, anyway," Hermione replied. "We're not there yet. So far, we only know that each spell seems to leave behind a unique imprint of the witch or wizard who cast the spell, and that the imprints tend to stick around for three or four years. The strength of the imprint can tell us approximately when the victim was cursed."

Harry shivered. "So we all carry around a bit of anyone who's cast a spell on us?" he asked.

"In a matter of speaking, yes," Hermione answered. "But, you see? Eventually we'll be able to quickly tell whether a patient has been hit by several curses simultaneously by determining whether more than one person had cast spells upon them in a particular time period. We may even be able to track down the spell casters and examine their wands. This may give real hope for patients with difficult symptoms that we've so far been unable to diagnose - and therefore unable to treat. Once we've worked out how to recognize the individual imprints, of course, which is rather a lot of work..."

Hermione sat back in her desk chair and considered her friend. Harry's usual span of attention for these types of conversations was quite short, especially when it involved either Hermione's studies or her work. Though she was still quite keen to talk about these newt studies to someone outside the department, she wondered how long Harry would let her go on about the spell signature project. But, she noticed, his eyes were still more or less focused on hers, and though he was still fiddling with her scroll, he didn't appear to doing it consciously. "Why Harry," she thought, "you've become quite the little professional, haven't you?"

"So, these letters are loaded with magical imprints of common spells?" Harry asked.

Hermione smiled. "Quite the professional, indeed," she thought, before continuing with her long-winded explanation. "Data," Hermione corrected. "These are the results of our first magical creature tests. It took some doing, but we found volunteers - well, mostly ourselves and some colleagues - to curse newts with various, well-known fighting spells. My interns have just finished up three weeks worth of potions work to withdraw the magical signature from each of one-hundred newts, and I need to study the signatures now to see if I can decode them and find which spell casters hit them - to see if our imprints present themselves in any identifiable and repeatable way."

Hermione's face took on a look of academic interest now. "All I have now will be a sort of collection of colors, shapes, smells, tastes and sizes. It's all rather complicated," Hermione added needlessly, "but it's how we normally study any attributes of a person's magical signature. There's a potion that needs to be made, and a hair from the victim is added along with a few incantations... Anyway, after several weeks, a spark is emitted and we collect it in the form of these parchments."

Harry was squinting at Hermione. She knew that she was never very good at explaining these things. Taking a large breath, she plunged forward, curious now why she wasn't being teased. As she spoke, a part of Hermione's brain set about the business of coming up with theories for why Harry might be interested in the diagnosis of complex maladies. It was now imminently clear to her that Harry wasn't just trying to be polite. He'd never been this courteous before when it came to her academic or research pursuits. Was someone he knew presenting strange symptoms of unknown origin? Or was he concerned about the ability to use newts as alternatives to human studies? Finally, Hermione remembered vaguely that Harry had expressed an interest months ago in her research, pointing out possible applications in cases that he had worked.

"The sparks are recorded as data," she continued, now eyeing Harry suspiciously, "and I need to find patterns in the data. It's easier to do when I know which spells have been cast, so there's still a lot more research to do before we'll be able to help the poor undiagnosed patients. Eventually, it'll all get mapped out. We hope."

There was a gentle knock on the office door and Hermione broke from her recitation. "Come in," she said, standing up to receive her visitor properly. Harry stood as well, and soon found himself engaged in a very strong and vigorous handshake with a slightly aged witch he'd never met before.

"Um... hello," he said, greeting the witch with an uncertain smile.

"Pearl," Hermione interjected, "this is Harry Potter. Harry, this is Pearl Devers. She works in Dr. Hughes's department as well."

Pearl continued to shake Harry's hand. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Potter. Pleased indeed," she quipped, excitedly.

Harry caught Hermione's eye and tried to plead silently for a little help with dislodging Pearl's hand from his own. He received a smirk from his friend, who seemed to be enjoying her colleague's show of enthusiasm over meeting Harry Potter. Harry's eyes sharpened to a glare and he turned to Pearl, grabbing her wrist lightly with his free hand and coaxing her fingers to release their grip.

"I'm very pleased to meet you as well," said Harry. Looking at Pearl, with her white research robes on and her prim hairdo, he was reminded that he'd come in to his friend's office, unannounced. This was a place where serious thinking happened, Harry realized, and he suddenly felt very uncomfortable to be taking up any more of Hermione's time. "I'll just be going, then," he said, addressing Hermione, "and leave you and Pearl to your work."

"Nonsense," chastised Pearl. "I was only coming by to see if Hermione wanted to get a cup of tea down at the cafeteria." She smiled at Harry. "Imagine my surprise to find such a handsome young man in her office."

Hermione's eyebrows shot up, and Pearl seemed suddenly embarrassed - as if remembering that it wasn't exactly proper etiquette to comment on a witch's or wizard's looks in a place of work. She straightened her robes and took a step back toward the door. "Perhaps tomorrow, then?" she asked Hermione.

"Actually," Hermione said, chewing on her bottom lip, "I'll come and get you sometime later this morning. I've had the most amazing luck with those newt studies and I'm dying to tell you about our newest developments." Harry watched the two witches as they exchanged a few more pleasantries. It was a delight to see his friend in her natural element, salivating over data and gossiping with her work mates about test results and newts. He chuckled, involuntarily.

After Pearl left, Harry turned to Hermione. "Thanks for the help there," he said, offering an impressive sneer.

"My pleasure," Hermione returned, biting back a smile. "But I have to tell you, Harry, that I haven't seen Pearl get flustered ever - over anything!" She walked back to her desk and plopped down. "That was a rare treat, that was."

Harry frowned; this conversation was not headed toward a place where he felt comfortable.

"And she's not the only older witch around here who thinks the eminent Harry Potter is a dish," Hermione continued. "Our receptionist, Annie...she has a little picture of you in her top desk drawer."

"Okay, okay," Harry pleaded, his temperament taking a turn for the worse, "you've had your fun little Miss Research Associate. Now if you'll wipe that grin off your face, I have a few questions for you." He sat back down in his chair and gave his mischievous friend what he hoped was a very serious look. Ideas were forming in his head - ones that had been seeded weeks or maybe even months ago, and he couldn't believe that he'd forgotten about them.

With his face now bearing a look of genuine interest, his eyes squinting again, Harry set the roll of parchment he'd been holding in the center of the desktop. "Hermione," he said, "looking at these data letters... you can tell which person it was who threw a curse at the victim?" He was staring at the parchment roll now, and speaking in a low voice.

Hermione picked up a long, tattered quill that had been lying on her desk and sucked on the end of it, thinking. "Yes, but again, it's easier because I know the spells that were cast and there are correlations between --" she began.

But Harry interrupted her. "So it's easier...quicker...if you already know the spell you are looking for?" he asked.

"But that's the point, Harry," Hermione answered, a bit condescendingly, "We don't know the spell, and the spell caster isn't the problem, we need to design a treatment --"

She was interrupted again by a very excited Harry. "But when you do know the spell," he repeated, "you can do it? You can tell me who did the curse?"

"Yes, of course," Hermione answered, scrutinizing Harry again. While she herself was prone to launching off on long-winded explanations of her work or an interesting article she'd come across, it was rare to catch Harry in the act of being an Auror. She smiled. He seemed so grown up to her, so inquisitive and focused. A twenty-six year old wizard all of a sudden sat before her in a very foreboding uniform and sporting a look of intensity on his face. This was not the kind of heroic intensity Harry had when he was younger, but a kind of steady intensity that befitted a driven and responsible, serious young Auror. Hermione found this look very becoming. It was even a bit sexy, if she thought about it.

"If you had access to the caster, then you could identify the curse as theirs?" Harry asked, recapturing Hermione's attention.

"I think it's possible," she replied. "That's what I need to prove by examining this data. I'll know in a week or so whether the signatures are sufficiently repeatable."

Harry smiled and looked up at his friend.

"What?" asked Hermione, wondering what could be less humorous than the painstaking research she had just described.

"Hermione!" Harry said. He was very animated now. Hermione could feel his excitement building as he worked the cogs of his brain, trying to forge a relationship between the sterile medical world in which she labored and the gritty, adrenaline-filled world of Dark wizard catchers. "If I told you that a curse was used to blow up a shopping mall, and I know who did it... we've got them in custody for that embezzlement scam I've been working on all year... but it'll only be for a short time." He was rambling now, speaking in parsed sentence as if he couldn't get the information out quickly enough. "We're in the final stages of preparing our case for court, and we think we've got a solid conviction, only embezzlement in the wizarding world doesn't exactly put someone in Azkaban for life."

Harry looked at Hermione, his eyes drilling into hers.

"I know who blew up that mall in London and killed all those people at the end of the war, but haven't any proof," he said. "They destroyed their wands long before we caught them..." Harry paused, still holding Hermione's eyes with his own. She wondered briefly whether he was trying to detect her thoughts, but laid the notion aside immediately. This was just Harry, the interrogator, looking for help, seeking closure. Hermione felt her heart drop.

"Harry," she said carefully, "that was over eight years ago..."

"But if you knew the spell and the caster, could that help you to decipher even a weak trace? What if we got the prisoners to recreate the spell for you, would that help?"

"Possibly," Hermione replied. She bit her bottom lip and stared at the ceiling for a moment, tapping her quill on the desktop. "It's a matter of arithmancy and statistics...."

"Then it's possible?" Harry asked.

"It may be possible," she relented. "But Harry, the traces are found in a person's magical signature... you're talking about a building." Hermione's head tilted a bit; she was hoping that Harry hadn't put too much stock in her research as of yet. Disappointing Harry on this subject - the war and his capture of the worst perpetrators - was just unthinkable.

"They were people," Harry said somberly.

Hermione straightened her head and blinked. Her face looked as if she'd just swallowed acid. "They blew up Muggle-borns," Harry continued. "Some were young, so they wouldn't have had any other spells cast on them at all. I thought that might help with the traces... Death Eaters eventually destroyed the building in an altercation with the Order, but it all started with a massive group of Voldemort's followers, having fun with destructo spells... blowing up innocent people."

Hermione nearly fainted. She and Ron and Harry, they had been off fighting Voldemort alone when the shopping mall incident had occurred in London. "They blew up children... and all those Muggles, just to draw The Order away from...." she stammered.

"Us. It was a decoy," Harry said. "It was meant to draw as many of our side into London as they could while Voldemort alone took over the school. He told me, that night, that he wanted the world to know that he alone broke the last safe haven for Dumbledore's followers. He was going to set up a new headquarters of sorts right there at Hogwarts." Harry dropped his eyes, speaking calmly and without emotion. "He said that hundreds of Muggles were about to die. I couldn't imagine where or why, and I wish beyond anything that I could have pulled that information from his mind."

Harry looked up. "You have to believe me."

Hermione sat back in her office chair and stared at the fireplace. How much had her perception of the world changed since before Harry's face had appeared in the flames just moments ago? "Muggles," she thought, "being used to lure all of the people who he loved away so that Harry would be alone when Voldemort attacked Hogwarts." It seemed absurd, she thought, but she'd actually forgotten how horrible things had become during the war.

"Harry," Hermione said softly, "you've never told us what Voldemort said. Never."

She knew why Harry hadn't wanted to retell the events of Voldemort's destruction, and had never pressed him. She hadn't even ever been curious, now that she thought about it.

It felt strange to hear the words spoken, and she knew that Harry wouldn't want to magnify their importance somehow by contributing them to the legend. "Let Voldemort die without a final word," she thought. In Hermione's cramped office, the two old friends sat staring at one another. Hermione stayed as still as she could manage and waited calmly for Harry to finish.

"He also felt, I think, that his Death Eaters kept bumbling my murder," Harry said. "He wanted the prophesy taken care of once and for all. I think that as long as I was alive, Voldemort's invincibility would always be questioned. People still thought there must have been something about me that trumped his powers or something, and he told me it had to end - on that night. So, for that one night, Voldemort chose to isolate himself from all his followers."

Hermione sat still, breathing heavily. "In the end..." Harry was saying, "Hermione, in the end, that was what helped us. I couldn't have fought Voldemort and his Death Eaters, and you and Ron would have been killed. But, you see? These Muggle-borns didn't know anything about all of that. And hundreds of Muggles as well died in that mall. The idea that their deaths helped to save us, it's hard to live with sometimes."

A wry smile grew on Hermione's lips. "Yeah. We can figure out who cast those spells," she said in an almost-whisper. She sounded confident, but felt nervous. Isolating the casters' signatures would be much harder than Harry was making it sound. But she would try. She would do anything for Harry.

Harry smiled and rocked back in his chair. "You're brilliant, you know that?" he said.

"Oh, I'm not so smart," Hermione replied, feeling embarrassed that she may have misrepresented her part in the whole research effort. "Dr. Hughes is leading this project. I only came up with the idea - and it was for a different purpose altogether, remember?"

She flicked her gaze back toward the fireplace. "It hadn't occurred to me that I could help all of those Muggles out there who still think the war hadn't really ended. It just stopped one day for them, without any type of gratification. Just... ended."

Harry threw a puzzled look at his friend. "Hermione, you didn't know that our team was tracking down the wizards and witches responsible," he said, mockingly. "How on Earth do you propose that you should have thought to go researching spell traces for that purpose?" He smiled. "You are barmy sometimes. Ron had that right."

"Well," Hermione replied, flustered, "I just feel like we've been wasting time."

She picked up a quill and began scribbling notes on a yellow sheet of parchment, organizing her thoughts and writing down the beginnings of a new test plan for her interns to carry out. She was on her third sheet of parchment when she heard a shuffling near the fireplace and looked up in time to see that Harry was preparing to leave. This brought a rush of heat up the back of her neck as Hermione realized that for a second there, she'd forgotten she had company. "Amazing," she thought. "Your social skills are simply amazing, Hermione." She scrunched her eyebrows as a question popped into her mind - one that seemed to have been formed in a different century.

"Harry?" she asked.

"Hmm?" Harry replied, standing on the grey stone of the hearth and dipping his hand in a tiny tin withdrawn from his pocket.

"Why did you Floo?"

"Oh," Harry gasped. "Thanks, I would have forgotten." He laughed. "I wanted to know if you'd have dinner with me tonight. I was feeling a bit restless."

"I have classes tonight..." Hermione replied.

"Until when?"

"Until seven," said Hermione, staring at the pile of parchments that still lay unopened on her desk. She desperately wanted to start studying them, and knew she'd be sorely tempted to stay up late after class deciphering the data.

"Maybe another time, then?" Harry asked.

He didn't look too disappointed, Hermione thought. "Okay, then," she replied, surprising herself enormously. Since they'd been reunited in the spring, Hermione couldn't recall ever turning down an offer from Harry. But she was compelled beyond comprehension to pull Harry out of the shadows of his guilt - even if it would take research breakthroughs of an extraordinary magnitude. She felt such love for him at the moment.

"Harry," Hermione added, "I'll set up some experiments this week... to see if we can recognize an individual magical signature from an older spell." Harry smiled wide, nodding. "It'll happen, Harry. I know it will."

When he returned to his office at Auror Headquarters, Harry drew his wand and aimed it deftly at a massive filing cabinet that stood ominously against the wall adjacent to his desk. He issued several charms to release privacy spells which were set to guard the contents of files that were encased in the huge, metal drawers. For years now, Harry had been leading a crusade of sorts, seeking information from old friends and contacts he'd kept from the war years and working to persuade his bosses and colleagues to pursue even the tiniest of leads. Alongside each regular assignment Harry went on, whether tracking down missing Death Eaters or investigating violent, magical crimes, an ear and an eye were always probing about for anything else that might help him in his quest to solve the London Mall bombing case.

It had been an intensely personal journey, the years of exhaustive work that had finally led to the big arrest. The case was highly visible within the Auror department, and the targets of the investigation, now in custody, were dubbed the "London Seven". There were few doubts among Aurors that these witches and wizards were guilty of far greater crimes than those they were being tried for, and the cunningness that Harry's group had used to bring about their current charges was almost folklore now within the department's halls.

Harry had hoped that the upcoming trial would bring about a sense of peace within himself, wishing quietly that some of the age-old cobwebs woven from thick strands of guilt and shame would clear away and leave him renewed in spirit, if even just a bit. Every year when the wizarding world celebrated June 10^th and lauded him as their hero, Harry would spend his day among Muggles: a penance to make sure he never forgot who died so that he could save his own kind. This year, when he and Hermione attended the Street War Street Party on Main Street, Harry had actually been uplifted to see the Muggles celebrating. There at the Street Party, Harry could see that most Muggles, at least, had found a way to move on, and he'd vowed silently to try and find a way to move on as well. He needed to release himself somehow from the shadows of that giant mall that was brought down only so that Voldemort could have his day of reckoning.

Thoughts of Hermione on that day back in June, shooting a stick from her caramel apple at a rubbish bin and missing abysmally, brought a smile to Harry's face. He reached into one of the file drawers and selected a few dark grey folders, setting them down on his office desk, resolved to get back to work. "That barmy witch just might be on to something..." he reflected, filled with fondness for his best friend. Sitting comfortably in his desk chair, Harry closed his eyes and breathed in the sweet smell of fresh-mown grass that he'd charmed his office to carry.

He may have fallen short with the convictions that he wanted so badly - the London Seven was likely to get only years in prison, and Harry wanted them gone for life - but Harry did feel a tiny sense of accomplishment as of late. It was only days ago that he'd witnessed the complete unraveling of one of the world's most accomplished witches, as Hermione broke down over discovering some of the details of his own past. But today, Harry reflected... today he'd seen her revived. Hermione wasn't talking about celibacy anymore, and she wasn't crying on his shoulder, seeking to come to terms with something that could never make sense. She was in her element, and Harry felt that he'd contributed to this, just a little bit. And, he thought, if she could actually help him link the mall bombing to the London Seven...

Shaking his head, Harry forced his attention back to the file on his desk. Play time was over for the morning, and it was time to get back to the dull business of preparing for a criminal trial. Short sentence or not, this conviction was real, and he owed it to the Muggle population to give his best to put their villains away.