The house looked exactly as he remembered it, although he felt it was somehow smaller, the ceilings lower, the hallway narrower, as though four months at Hogwarts had quietly changed his sense of scale. He unpacked, and the textbooks were sorted onto the shelf Jean had cleared for him.
It was late at night— alone in his room with the door shut and the house quiet— that he finally tested his theory.
The idea had taken root back in the summer. How the Trace flagged magic. Because the Ministry only monitored location rather than the specific caster, living in a household with multiple young witches or wizards offered a convenient kind of cover.
Hermione was still young, and her magic was still untrained and unpredictable, so any flare the Ministry picked up from this house could plausibly belong to either of them. He had been reasonably confident in the theory. But he still never actually tested it.
He didn't bother with a wand. He held his hand out and conjured a small fire.
He waited, holding his breath as each minute slowly passed. But nothing came. No owl tapped at the window, no unexpected visitor arrived at the door. Extinguishing the flame, he thought: Whatever method the Ministry uses to detect underage magic, it doesn't work here.
~Meanwhile~
Two floors below ground level, in a windowless office of the Improper Use of Magic Office crowded with humming brass instruments and towers of half-sorted parchment, a small silver dial mounted on the wall twitched, registered a single flare of unregistered magical activity, and dutifully printed a slip of parchment that fed itself into an overflowing tray already stacked three inches deep with identical slips.
The witch on duty, a heavyset woman named Olivia Ogden who had worked the Trace desk for eleven years and disliked every minute of it, glanced at the newest slip without much enthusiasm.
Granger residence. Two registered underage witches/wizards. Signature inconclusive.
She checked it against the household file— two names, one Hogwarts-enrolled, one not yet of age to attend, both technically eligible sources for the flare. Inconclusive signatures from multi-child households made up perhaps a third of her tray on any given day, and the department's official policy on them had been settled for decades.
Without a clean signature match to a single individual, no warning could be issued, since issuing one risked disciplining the wrong child, and the resulting complaints generated more paperwork than the infractions themselves were worth.
She stamped the slip NO ACTION— INSUFFICIENT SIGNATURE CLARITY, filed it in the tray reserved for exactly that outcome, and moved on to the next one without a second thought, already three slips deep into a stack that would take her past midnight to clear.
The Granger file, had anyone ever bothered to pull it and read its contents, would have found out that the household was generating an unusually high volume of inconclusive flares. But fortunately no one pulled it. There was no procedure that required anyone to, and Olivia Ogden had considerably more pressing things to do.
~
He found her in the small back room Jean and Adam had started calling "the study," though its actual function had long since been overtaken by Hermione's ever-expanding collection of borrowed and illegally acquired reading material. Illegally, as in borrowed from him and never returned.
She was cross-legged on the floor, three books open around her in a rough semicircle, the leather-bound notebook he had sent her propped against her knee.
She finally glanced up, her face instantly brightening. "Aegeus!"
"How is your studying going?" Aegeus asked.
"Take a look at this!" she said, lifting the book toward him, tapping her pencil against the heavily underlined line as if reminding him of a trial transcript. "'To call forth flame, one must become the hearth.' Tell why don't they just give straight answers instead of stupid metaphors?" she said, exasperated.
"Because they want to sound profound," said Aegeus helplessly.
He crossed the room and crouched beside her, glancing over the page properly for the first time. "Calling forth flame just means to focus, so that fire becomes an extension of your own self."
Hermione glared at him, fighting the temptation to swat him with her notebook. "Aegeus! I asked you to explain it, not confuse me further!"
Aegeus realized a horrifying truth— he had spent so much time reading these wretched texts that he was actually starting to sound like them.
Hermione's eyes then dropped to the open text, lingering for a beat before snapping back to his. Her expression sharpened. "Did you have to go through all of that to make fire?"
"Of course." That's a lie.
Isn't it just making fire? Isn't it just a matter of whether I want to or not?
~
Noah showed up two days after Christmas, knocking on the door.
"Miss me?" Noah said, by way of greeting, already halfway through the door before Aegeus had fully opened it.
"You look different." Noah paused, looking at him up and down. "Are you taller? Or did you have a new haircut?"
I don't know, but it's been four months," Aegeus said simply.
"Yeah, I suppose..." said Noah as he dropped his coat somewhere in the vicinity of the hall stand. "So. Boarding school... was it as busy as you made it sound in your one letter?"
"I sent more than one..."
"You sent three, and they were all short enough to fit on a postcard!" Noah threw his hands up. "So? How was it?"
Aegeus considered how much of the truth he could say here.
"It was eventful..."
"Evenful? What does that even mean?"
"And sometimes interesting."
"Sometimes?" Noah rolled his eyes. "Fine. Keep your boarding school secrets."
"Did you make any friends?"
"Two."
"Just two?!"
"I'm selective."
Noah snorted, reaching for the television. "You're something alright. Come on, my mum invited you for dinner, and I already told her you said yes."
Aegeus followed him without much protest, the strange, hollow ache from the train platform finally starting to settle— not gone, but taking a step back to leave room for the familiar warmth of an ordinary evening at home, the kind he hadn't realized, until just now, that he had missed.
_________________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
~~~
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