Until the end of the Christmas and New Year holidays, Susan and I explored the best ice rinks in Paris, choosing a new one each day. We especially liked the rink right on the Eiffel Tower and the one on the Champs-Élysées - it's very beautiful there at Christmas. Mountain skiing didn't tempt my friend, so I'm the one lying on the slopes alone after another fall. My parents are doing much better, and Susan just walks around, breathing the air. It's good to have a magic bus at hand that travels all over France. There you are in Dijon, and five minutes later - you're already in Chamonix.
After the holidays ended, I immersed myself in work as much as possible. I was still doing an internship at St. Nicholas Hospital, brewing potions, practicing occlumency with Professor de Flois, and his homework took a couple of hours a day. Now we're working on constructing false memories. If a legilimens can't break through occlumency shields, they'll know that something is being hidden from them, but a false memory gives the impression that there are no secrets, everything is in plain sight, nothing more to search for. This method of occlumency is more promising, but more difficult. Probably, Snape uses exactly this method. Voldemort would hardly tolerate someone openly concealing something from him. Professor de Flois is also gradually teaching me legilimency. At the same time, he demonstrates how true and false memories might look in someone else's head. Looking at someone else's memory is like trying to control your own dream. As soon as you lose control a little, the consciousness, emotions, and associative connections of the memory's owner carry you along with them, not where you yourself need to go. Finding something necessary in someone else's head is quite a task. It's completely different from mental dialogues with Luna.
In general, legilimency opens up great opportunities for studying something new. After all, you can get knowledge directly from the teacher's head. The main thing is to find a teacher who would agree to teach in this way. And the legilimens themselves need to learn to act gently and delicately. According to de Flois, I sometimes jump through someone else's memory like a merry kangaroo. However, like all beginners.
I resumed lessons with a shooting instructor and signed up for Latin dancing - need to maintain my form at least somehow. I suggested Susan come with me, she also needs to recover after the hospital, but she considered Latin dancing too depraved and signed up for European ballroom dancing.
In the first working week, I received a letter from Snape. No, it wasn't a belated New Year greeting. The letter had only one question: "Granger, you foolish girl, what the hell did you show Potter sectumsempra for?"
I knew he would learn the result of his spell. The question seems rhetorical, but I'll still answer:
"Professor Snape,
I have never spoken with Potter after the OWLs. And I wouldn't have shown him that spell because Potter is a fool. I found it in a library book - it was sixth-year potions. Probably that book is with Potter now.
Respectfully, Hermione Granger"
Now let him search Potter and confiscate his textbook - who knows what else is in there. I wonder who Potter cut this time? Obviously, Snape was quite angry if he bothered to write me such a pointless letter. Probably one of his Slytherins. In any case, I hope not fatally.
Neville provided the answer. Harry cursed Nott with some spell, the Slytherin nearly died and was sent to the hospital wing for a long time. And Snape fined Gryffindor two hundred points and assigned Harry two months of detention. Harry saw the mark on Nott, Nott is planning something...
No, I won't advise Neville anything. If he wants to, let him watch Nott - he's already been drawn in anyway.
***
At work, I've been trusted to conduct primary diagnostics in a standard ritual circle myself, though they still watch me. Very useful skill, by the way. Even though wizards don't get sick from many things in principle, diagnostics can be modified for your needs, and then it will be better than any MRI. True, I'll have to deal with this myself if I decide to focus specifically on this, because wizards mostly don't care about Muggles and their diseases.
I was allowed to attend rituals for removing dark curses. And I can honestly say - it's terrifying! Due to my age and inexperience, I didn't participate, only observed. Even providing backup and feeding magic to the lead wizard in case of need was only trusted to experienced people. But even as a spectator, I experienced a mass of emotions.
First, how some patients look before treatment - it's not a sight for the faint-hearted. For example, it might be some horror with a bunch of extra arms and legs - Durga's curse, though canonical Durga only had extra arms. Some limbs are defective and underdeveloped, some are huge. Such a person can't walk independently at all, but isn't going to die either. As I was told, it looks scarier than it actually is.
Second, the pressure of dark magic itself is felt - sometimes it's like hopeless grief, like from a dementor, sometimes it becomes creepy and you want to hide in a closet. This doesn't happen at every ritual, only at the most difficult ones. This can only be fought with occlumency. Therefore, all doctors who deal with curses are very good occlumens.
Third, during the ritual, something terrible happens to people. Often people look as if they're being tortured. And sometimes it's not just appearance - after the ritual, some say they don't remember anything, and some say they've never felt so bad in their lives.
Some curses, after being extracted from the patient's body, have quite visible forms. Sometimes it's black smoke in which terrible faces appear, sometimes something slimy and disgusting, sometimes something resembling a group of viruses enlarged to the size of tennis balls. After extraction from the patient, the curse is placed in a special vessel by spell. New and unknown ones are then transferred to the local department of mysteries, and known ones are destroyed right in the jar.
Brr... In general, working with serious curses is not for me.
I was allowed to look around all departments, but mainly I dealt with primary diagnostics - because there weren't enough hands, and helped the chief potioneer - because you can never have too many potions. Ooh, brewing potions on the scale of a large hospital is a separate topic. The chief potioneer has several assistants, and each of them can simultaneously brew up to six potions. Sometimes potions are brewed individually, and sometimes the first person cuts ingredients for three at once, while the second stirs for two. As they say, a real potioneer is a multitasking device. How people can keep track of everything at once and not confuse anything doesn't fit in my head yet. I wasn't loaded so heavily, but I still messed up from time to time due to unfamiliarity. Good thing this was known in advance - everyone makes mistakes at first, so I didn't ruin anything expensive or labor-intensive.
***
At dancing, I met André Ledoux. André is smart, cheerful, and handsome. We danced excellently together, and then became friends. More precisely, he became friends with me, and I... I was thinking about how to cleverly drag him to bed. The problem is that he's thirty, and I'm - he thinks I'm seventeen. So we continue to walk through parks, museums, and movies. André, by the way, is a neurosurgeon - he graduated from the same university where I'm planning to study. At dancing, he presses me against him, but we haven't even kissed once, and I'm slowly starting to go crazy. This hasn't gone unnoticed - Professor de Flois has been constantly scolding me lately, my occlumency shields have become full of holes, and André sticks out of all the holes. For the professor, it's all simple - he advised me to quickly marry this André and stop being distracted from lessons. Really, what's the problem.
***
One fine spring day, I found Rita and Sirius in the reception ward. "Surpriiiise!" They decided that it would be better for Rita to give birth in France, and she would live here for the last month. The Blacks have a small cottage in Nice, where Rita will live with Cassie and Bunny. From there, she can move to the hospital by floo at any moment. The twins are drawing a lot of magic from their mother - this pregnancy is harder for Rita, she didn't even argue with Sirius about leaving England. Padfoot himself is eager to get back to the war with Voldemort. Hasn't had enough war yet, the fool.
Diagnostics showed that the children are healthy and magically strong - you can already see it, and the mother could use a strengthening potion. I entered Mrs. Black's data into a new chart and redirected her to the appropriate hospital department.
In the evening, when Rita and Cassie were already asleep, Sirius and I sat in their living room and discussed what was happening in England.
Charity! Should Charity have died so early? How could this be? In the wizarding world, she was considered a strange eccentric who for some reason loved Muggles. Worse than Mr. Weasley - he was just interested in Muggles like exotic animals in a zoo, but Charity tried to prove something to someone, conducted research, wrote articles. She floated somewhere in her ideas, far from real life. I only saw her at dinners in the Great Hall, but her articles evoked sympathy.
But this is certainly a reason to propose my plan to Black. I need to indirectly save Snape before he demands his debt from me, but Padfoot doesn't need to know such subtleties.
I suggested killing the snake in an already proven way - with a bomb. Voldemort and his pet still live in Malfoy Manor. And Narcissa still has access there. She doesn't need to return there openly - she just needs to let rabbits into her garden. Small bombs with the same explosion and neutralization runes can be glued to the rabbits' fur in an inconspicuous place. But this time the runic chain should be on the outside, and the runes should be written with different inks. The neutralization chain should dissolve in the snake's gastric juice. And when Nagini eats the rabbit, after some time she'll blow up. I suggested using basilisk venom again, to be sure. Eh, at this rate I'll soon be out of venom. Poor rabbits. On the other hand, I'm not a vegetarian anyway. Sirius liked the plan, and he confirmed that he would make the bombs without me this time. Once again reminded him to be extremely careful in the process, and we switched to more pleasant things.
For the children, if they're boys, names have already been chosen: Regulus and Arcturus. When Arcturus masters his name, speech therapy sessions can be cancelled. For girls, names haven't been chosen yet - wizards don't determine gender in advance. Though Padfoot is sure that this time there will be sons, and if not - Rita will have to give birth again.
At this rate, soon all of Magical Britain will be populated by Blacks and Weasleys.
Sirius left to go back to war. Though they fight more with conversations in the kitchen - sorry, in the headmaster's office. Voldemort and his servants have done many deeds during this time, and where are the retaliatory actions? Among the Death Eaters, the last victims were Selwyn and Greyback, whom Snape killed while saving me. And the Order of the Phoenix had nothing to do with it. Snape is in the Order, of course, but these murders weren't planned anyway. Probably, the whole thing is that murders split the soul. And the kind grandfather is waiting for the Death Eaters to split themselves completely and die on their own. Though, Lucius also suffered from dementors. And there it's unclear who had a hand in it - Dumbledore or Voldemort.
And Rita, without the ability to spy as a beetle, became fascinated with fashion shows. However, for wizards her tastes are far too bold, and local magical magazines don't risk printing her articles, so she voices her opinion about what's fashionable and beautiful now from the pages of the Quibbler. If Sirius wanted to hide her in France from Death Eaters, his idea failed.
***
A month later, Rita gave birth to two sons. Regulus and Arcturus, healthy, magically strong children. However, a week after giving birth, she delegated the main care of the babies to her house-elf and went out partying, pulling her newly acquired waist tighter in a corset. Bunny now has three children on her hands - good thing changing a child into clean clothes can be done instantly with a snap of elvish fingers. But perhaps it's not very good that elves become closer to wizard children than their parents. When Cassie started talking about a year ago, her first word was "Bunny," not "mama."
Rita is a nasty, brazen, shameless journalist! She found out about André and dragged both of us to a nightclub to get drunk to music. She asks provocative questions, flirts, laughs loudly, feels biceps, and doesn't forget to pour alcohol for all three of us. Bitch! For some reason she doesn't get drunk herself. Either a potion or evanesco. But she gets us drunk. Why? André is also good - he found out that Rita recently gave birth to twins and admired how wonderful she looks and what a good figure she has after childbirth. He should have advised her to go home to the children and not get wasted - some doctor he is.
What is Rita saying there? She promises to tell something terribly compromising about Hermione if André brings us more drinks?! And winks with a drunk eye. I'm sure it's pretense. André went to the bar, and I decided to clarify the situation:
"Rita! What are you doing?" - I try to look as stern as possible.
"Ah, Hermione, relax, I'm helping you, by the way," - this brazen beetle waves me off.
"I don't need your help! I'll curse you!" - I promise.
"That's not serious, dear!" - Rita laughs, "If you want to threaten, come up with something believable. Oh, André!" - waves her hand behind my back.
"André, let's dance! I love this song!" - I intercept the man and pull him away from Rita. She really will tell something devastating now. If she doesn't have devastating material - she'll lie heartily, and that's it! And I can't curse the mother of three children.
My legs and tongue are getting tangled, André's legs are getting tangled too. He drank with Rita, naive man - she was definitely cheating. So we dance, supporting each other. André says something strange. I thought I heard: "I can't believe I could fall in love with such a young girl..." What? But I don't have time to ask - he kisses me. So that's why I'm the young girl? But my body will be eighteen in six months! We'll discuss it later though - it's been so long since I was kissed like this...