The Green Girl

Everything Ends (and Begins)

~ After the Battle ~

Graduation felt anticlimactic. Hermione sat her N.E.W.T. exams, laughed with friends, avoided the accusing glares of Ginny Weasley and her compatriots, and let spring unfold. Flowers pushed their way through the cold, Scottish soil and the sun began to warm her skin and they all waited as one chapter of their lives came to an end.

"Are you ready?" Draco asked her one day, as they sat throwing rocks into the lake.

"For what?" she asked, watching with some annoyance as he skipped a rock seven times across the surface of the water.

"Marriage," he said. "Politics."

"It's been politics since he came back," she said. "We've lived years in the shadows of politics."

"Marriage, then?" Draco asked.

"Love," Hermione said. "Friendship."

"They do conquer everything," Draco agreed. "I have Ginny Weasley's word on that."

Hermione tried not to laugh and instead look very solemn. "Yes. I find relying on the Weasleys works out well."

"Did for Potter," Draco said with his snake-mean smile.

And so spring unfurled and soon they were lined up, ready to walk up to a stage and face parents and family members as they were pronounced fully fledged wizards and witches, ready to be pushed out of the nest of Hogwarts and loosed on the world.

A boy in Ravenclaw was the first in their class and stood in the line, reviewing note cards with his speech written out on them. "I'm surprised it's not you," Draco had teased Hermione when the standings had come out. "You slacker."

"I was a bit busy this last year," she'd said, shoving him.

The speech was predictable and Hermione ignored it as she looked out at the audience. Draco's parents were there. Snape sat to the side, waiting to hand her some symbolic piece of paper that pronounced her a graduate. Her own parents were absent. "Stay in Australia," Hermione had suggested. "Why come back to rainy Britain when you can enjoy the sun and the beach in retirement?"

A tiny bit of an imperius had convinced them that permanent emigration was a brilliant idea.

She didn't quite trust Riddle not to decide to sever her only real tie to the Muggle world if he thought she was too attached to her parents for his liking and she'd certainly much prefer him not to have a weapon to hand to hold against her throat. They wouldn't see her graduate. They wouldn't see her get married. They'd enjoy the beach and yearly Christmas letters and nothing else.

Well, Neville would have to take the Mark. They all made sacrifices.

She made sure to refer to Narcissa as 'Mum' in front of Riddle after the graduation ceremony, then correct herself with some embarrassment.

Tom Riddle just smiled as he sipped his wine.

. . . . . . . . . .

Narcissa Malfoy threw a ball for the Hogwarts graduates; whether to go became a hotly debated topic. "They're Death Eaters," Ginny Weasley hissed to anyone who would listen. "They're evil."

"You didn't get an invitation anyway," Lavender Brown said, fingering the heavy linen card stock that welcomed her to the Manor with a proprietary near-lust. "So unless you can get some boy from our year to take you – which seems unlikely – or one of the recent Slytherin alums who've also been invited, you're just out of luck anyway."

"I could go if I wanted to," Ginny said but Lavender snorted and muttered something about delusional little girls needing to go nibble on their candy quills and let the graduates plan for their adult lives.