And, finally, here is the end to this agonizing fic! Actually a lot of people begged me to write a sequel, and I already have something in mind, but I won't start working on that for a looong time yet, since my mind is occupied by another word called Harry Potter and the Bite of No Mortibus. It's a sixth year fic, and, well, Hermione might just die at a point or another, but don't let that stop you please, especially since I think you might enjoy it (or you might completely hate it, but I still advice you to read it) so keep an eye out for that.
Anyway, on with the fic.
Harry Potter and the Knowledge of a Mother
By Pearl Drop Angel
Epilogue: The Snitch Capsule
It had been since the years of Harry Potter and his gang that Professor McGonagall hadn't lead such a brilliant…and…colorful graduating class to the Gryffindor Forever Remember Garden, and honestly, she was feeling a little nostalgic.
This gathering seemed to be the result of a clash collision between all the most memorable groups that had ever been under her teachings. She would both bless and curse this class's leaving. Life would be just a bit boring after their leaving.
As she walked briskly around the side of the lake, and then veered to the right, she stole a glance to the young woman beside her, the Hogwarts Head Girl. Looking at Marianne Potter-with her long, dark, luscious yet slightly bushy brown curls, her fair complexion, her slightly freckled, lovely, intelligent face-was just like watching a seventeen year old Hermione Granger, full of excitement and thirst for knowledge. Had it not been for her vivid, iridescent green eyes and her position as Gryffindor Seeker, she was every bit her mother's daughter.
Marianne felt her excitement rising within her at every step they took. She had a feeling that, whatever it was that McGonagall was going to show them, it was bound to be something wonderful. The walk was long, but she didn't mind, even if her fellow Gryffindors-with the exception, of course, of the Potter Brigade (as they had been dubbed)-didn't seem to share her enthusiasm. Finally, after a long siding of the lake, their Head of House walked away from the mass of water, heading for a clearing filled with unusual, amazing stones. Some were as small as her fist, some others were the size of Hagrid, but they were all covered in a plush, sweet smelling, brownish moss. They were also very regularly shaped, which must have meant that they must have been magical. It even smelled of magic, and memories, adventures, heartache and life. And of dreams, she added in her mind as she noticed the veiled white fog that circled endlessly around each stone.
"Very well," she said, stopping her fast, stern strides on the outskirts of the misty rock garden, watching each student's reaction to the wonderful mossy fog of the Garden, "this is the Gryffindor Forever Remember Garden," she explained, and with that, made to take something out of her robes. "Does anybody know what this is?" And she opened her palms to show a very tiny creature that seemed covered in the same moss as the stones. It looked like it had the body of a toothless seal and paddle-like oval "limbs" that were so thin that they seemed transparent. It had large wings, several times larger than its body, that it used to lift itself in the air, circling above the teacher's head. The wings were just as thin as the limbs, yet they showed a rippling of very small muscles and vessels running through the thin veil of mystical brown transparent moss. Happily, the creature gave up a merry cry of "Dig!"
Before Marianne could hold her hand in the air to answer, one of her friends, and member of the Potter Brigade (and largely known prankster) that went by the name of Gwen Weasley, called gaily, "Ooh! It looks good!" McGonagall effort in suppressing a sigh was widely noticeable.
"Yeah, can we eat it?" Piped Gwen's identical twin, Sonya. McGonagall didn't manage to suppress a groan as the creature fluttering behind her shoulders gave a terrified "Dig!" Marianne hid her snigger behind her hand. Even if Gwen and Sonya's father, Ron Weasley, wasn't exactly a model student, everyone in the Weasley clan had expected this set of twins to be a little more controlled than the previous one (known as the Twin Terrors till the day), especially because of their mother Krista, but apparently the whole family seemed to be cursed with one pair of identical redheads with a talent for troublemaking in each generation.
"No, Miss Weasley, you may not," McGonagall told her. "Now," she repeated, "does anybody know what this is?"
Marianne's hand shot up immediately.
"Yes, Miss Potter?"
"It's a Diggorinta," Marianne replied, and continued by giving a description of the animal very much like the one her mother had given several years prior. "It's a creature that associates a person, or group of people's, character, and finds the object that would be most suitable, or most needed, and brings it to light by digging."
"Very good, Miss Potter, ten points for Gryffindor," McGonagall exclaimed as she watched Caleb Malfoy give his best friend an encouraging pat on the shoulder, to which the girl blushed. The Head to the Gryffindor House would have never believed that she would one day have to host a Malfoy in her tower, but this one, despite the fact that he was the living portrait of his Slytherin father, was every ounce his Gryffindor mother. He and the Potter girl were her pride in this course. Proud, brilliant Gryffindors, even though they had that nonchalant rule-breaking streak that seemed to seep in both their lines. Their more than platonic friendship had become very amusing over the past couple of years, it was a bit like both their parents' courtships, albeit the previous generation had been far less blatant about it. "Now," she called their attention to the point, "the Diggorinta, though small, is rather powerful, and it's never wrong. Today, we will find the stone that most suits you young Gryffindors."
Many people were confused. They never felt the need to have a stone before.
"As a matter of fact, the Forever Remember Garden, this ground, is where we keep the history of every class that has Graduated Hogwarts till this day. The day before your graduation, you will leave your mark here as well, but, until then, you will have a previous class's actions to observe," and she gave a nod to the Diggorinta, who replied to her with a very happy, "Dig!" the fear of the Damsels of Doom dissipating before its task.
The animal looked confused before each of the students it passed, probably because each was differently suited from the one before. Sometimes it almost seemed to reach a decision, but, facing the next student, it would change its mind. Maybe because afraid of what Sonya and Gwen might have been planning, the Diggorinta left the two of them and the other two members of the Potter Brigade as the last.
Strangely, however, before them it brightened considerably, as though an epiphany had just claimed it. It hadn't even looked at them singularly, almost as if what would suit them best had been written in blinking neon lights across their forehead, which, of course, left the four slightly perplexed. Gwen and Sonya were looking at the Diggorinta in a very threatening manner, their hands in their robe pockets, ready to pull out some new instrument of "torture" to use in case they felt it necessary. The animal, however, seemed very sure to have reached the perfect verdict.
With more merry cries of "Dig!" it reached a boulder near the center of the clearing, and sat atop it. It was by far the strangest stone any of them had ever seen. First of all, it was perfectly spherical, and it was covered in moss filled carvings. Marianne squinted at them, adjusting her thin, framed glasses on the bridge of her nose and gasped.
"Caleb," she called to him, meeting his piercing gray eyes, "look!" He turned to the boulder with confused, furrowed eyebrows. "Oh, honestly! You're the Captain of the Quidditch team, for Merlin's beard! You should recognize a Snitch when you see one!"
He gasped at this, and looked more closely at the carvings. She was right, they looked like the wings of the Golden Snitch, that, when closed, hugged the sphere in an intricately entwined manner. He gave her a sheepish grin. "Well, you're the one who's familiar with Snitches, you're the Seeker. I don't see much of them from my position at the goal posts. If it was shaped like a hoop I would have recognized it right away," he called in his defense. She rolled her eyes at him with a small smile playing at her lips, and turned her attention back to the Diggorinta.
At the moment, the mossy skin of the Diggorinta in contact with the bolder seemed to blend with the moss of the stone, making them seem like one, strange looking creature made of pewter and moss. "Dig!" It cried enthusiastically, and, with a powerful flap of its wings, lifted itself and the stone to which it was attached in the air, lifting a good three meters in the air, leaving it to hover them, and detached itself from it.
Flying below it, the Diggorinta used its wings to draw a line following the outside of the indentation that the bolder had left on the wet ground, which seemed to shimmer from within. The animal raised itself back up so that it was hovering between the soft ground it had marked, and the bolder above its head, and, suddenly, without warning, it began to flap its paddle-like limbs frantically, like a dog digging to hide his bone in the yard. With each of those flaps the ground seemed to split, trembling under the students' feet, as though something was trying to push up from beneath. And it was!
The earth split like the sea before Moses, lifting up like lava from a volcano, and, suddenly, a shiny, glimmering, blinding sphere that seemed to be made of pure light erupted out of the dirt, perfectly clean, as though the muddy ground hadn't touched it at all, turning slowly on itself mere centimeters from their feet, as though trying to give them all a perfect view of its blinding beauty.
"Blimey!" Gwen exclaimed. "That's the biggest Snitch I've ever seen!" Sonya simply nodded in awe.
"Humph," McGonagall mused aloud. "Must be a family thing." Caleb gave Marianne a confused glance, which she returned, until the sphere stopped before her.
"Oh, look!" she called, pointing flabbergasted at a lock of sorts, that stared at her right at eye level. Standing there, on the lock, giving her significant looks were carved in gold a weasel, a big fox-wolf with four marked tails, and a man-sized hawk with a squiggle carved over its right eye, all standing before a huge bolt of lightning, three books at their feet.
They four of them knew what that meant, having heard the tale told endlessly since the day they'd been born. They knew that if the carvings had been painted, the weasel would have had shiny red fur, the blonde fox-wolf's eyes would have been a shining topaz color fading to white in the pupil, and the hawk's feathers and beak a metallic black, its iridescent eyes shining green in the dark, and the three books at their feet were Lily Evans diary, her vision's journal, and Vatis Divinus' last book of prophesies.
"Blimey!" The twins called simultaneously. Caleb and Marianne could only nod.
"Well, that explains the giant Snitch," muttered Sonya.
"What do you mean?" Asked Marietta, a girl that shared the twins' dorm room.
"It's in honor of the youngest Quidditch player of the last century," Sonya said.
"The savior of the Wizarding World twice over," Gwen piped up.
"The Boy Who Lived," they bragged pompously, since it was a widely known fact that their Godfather was, "Harry Potter."
An awed silence fell over the Garden.
Marianne was stunned into silence. Of course, she'd been expecting it, but it seemed to put everything in far too new a light to be taken in so quickly. Obviously, her parents deeds were always told everywhere and everyday. There was never a time in which she could go down to Hogsmeade in which people didn't stop her to tell her some amazing tale of her parents' doings. But that was exactly what bothered her. She'd never really been able to hear the tales from her parents mouths, because, before they could tell her of the first tasks they lived through, new ones appeared to distract her. After all, the two most important members of the Auror Bureau were constantly in danger.
Not that they didn't love to reminisce on their Hogwarts days, but it always felt as though in their retelling there were gigantic gaping voids, probably because they didn't want to tell her of all the rules had been broken, task that, apparently, Filch the caretaker and Snape the Potions master both thrived on. Even so, the stories weren't complete. And her parents school lives had always fascinated her. It was here that they had become heroes. It was here that everything had started. And maybe it would be here that she would find out exactly what had happened to make it so.
She felt Caleb take her hand. She knew that her father and his had been mortal enemies for the first several years of school. What had happened to make them the friends that they were today? Caleb seemed even more anxious to know, perhaps because, if Harry and Draco had never ended their animosity toward each other, she and he would have never been allowed to befriend each other, to love each other. They might have even been taught to hate each other.
So much had happened in the seven years Harry Potter had been at Hogwarts, there must have been something inside the giant Snitch that would tell them of it. Knowing her mother's cleverness, her father's deeds, and their best friend's Ron inventive, there was bound to be more than yearbooks and moving pictures!
She knew very well that Lily's diary, which was now in her home, always next to her parents' nightstand, must have come out of a time capsule such as this.
"Hey, Rianne," Sonya snapped her out of her thoughts. "Why is it that your parents got such cool Animagus forms, while our dad turns into a bloody red WEASEL?!" She asked, half angry, pointing at the lock on the mega Snitch.
"Wasn't it, obvious?" Caleb asked rhetorically. Like his father Draco, Caleb enjoyed making fun of the twins' father. His Animagus form, which was now registered, one of their favorite topics to pick on.
"Finish the sentence, Malfoy," Gwen threatened, "and I'll enjoy bouncing a white ferret in the air, like Mad-Eye taught me last Christmas."
Caleb gave her a cheeky grin, but turned to McGonagall, who'd stepped over to the golden floating sphere, pointed her wand at the lock and called out "Alohomora!" Nothing happened. But McGonagall seemed spurned by this. "Ah, this time, I know what to do," she exclaimed, sounding slightly mad. Pointing her wand at the lock again, she called out "I solemnly swear I'm up to no good!" She sounded rather pleased at saying this.
The class burst into laughter.
And nothing happened.
McGonagall frowned, scratching her chin, trying to remember something else. Again, she pointed her wand at her lock. "Mischief is done!" Nothing happened, and the students were in hysterics.
"Think she's been teaching one too many years," Gwen was heard telling Sonya.
Desperate, she began to call unlocking spells endlessly, interrupted only by the off topic word that she thought might work, "Marauders! Dumbledore! Potter! Visions!" And on and on she went, until she huffed and glared openly at the Snitch as though it was her last resort.
"Potter and his wife must have put hundreds of defensive charms on that thing," they could hear somebody whisper.
"It's going to take us days to get this thing open, if not more!"
"Do you think there's anything dangerous in there?"
"Of course there is!"
Thoughts like these were spreading like a wildfire.
Staring at the lock in front of her eyes, the bolt of lightning behind the Animagi brought a memory to surface, and she felt herself smiling. She had no idea, when her mother had taught her the spell over the summer, that it would help her so quickly "out of tightly locked situations", as she'd said. How her mother had known, she would never find out, but she'd probably thought it obvious. "Professor?" She called with her hand in the air.
Surprised, McGonagall snapped her eyes away from the mad sphere to look at her student.
"Yes, Miss Potter?"
"May I try?" Again, a deep furrow appeared between the teacher's eyebrows, this reminded her far too much of a scene that had taken place in that very same garden with another Potter some twenty years later. Not knowing what else to try, she nodded. Pulling her wand out of her robes, she raised it over her head. There weren't many clouds, and they were a bit thin, but they would serve her purpose well enough. Concentrating, she invoked, "DISCERSO NUBIS!" And guided a decent sized lightning bolt down with her wand to stop on the engraved lock before her eyes.
Many girls screamed, scared by the sudden streak of light and its following rumble.
The lock fizzled and gave sparks as it absorbed the thin pillar of light.
After that it went quiet, and Marianne frowned, thinking that she must have done something wrong. Maybe her Discerpo Nubis wasn't strong enough. And then it happened.
It began to shake, spinning on itself, orbiting on itself, the rumble of the thunder resounding in the clearing, and the faster it spun, the louder the rumbling became. Threads of electricity began to run through the surface of the sphere, growing in number as the Snitch gained momentum, crackling louder as it went along.
And then it stopped, the seal facing Marianne. What had looked like only the carvings of the Snitch's wings, spread out to reveal true, golden wings, as thin as a spiders web, which began to flutter so fast that they were nearly invisible, only the glittering glow of the gold telling that there was something at all moving before them.
And it began to move closer to them, out of the shadow of the boulder. They backed away from it, giving it all the room it wanted, all too stunned to utter a single word.
And, just as the sphere spinning and the wings fluttering became strong enough to make the Diggorinta chance a crash landing, just as the static became strong enough to get everyone's hair up in the air, just as the rumbling and crackling became deafening, then everything stopped.
Suddenly.
It stopped.
Everything.
No more spinning, or threads of electricity, or rumbling, or fluttering wings, which returned to their closed position, resembling simple carvings again. The wind died down right away and the only sound heard was the small crack of the sparks coming from the lock and from Marianne's wand.
Looking between the tip of her wand and the lock, Marianne came to a conclusion, and, wordlessly, she walked back up to the sphere, now blinding in full sunlight, and raised her wand, placing its tip against the tip of the lightning carved into the lock. The sparks melted into a single thread of electricity, which disappeared slowly, and, with a resounding click, the lock was slowly pushed back into the sphere, and, where the thin wings were outlined as carvings, the sphere began to open. Slowly, in front of their eyes the thin line became a crack, and then, before they even knew it, the top part of the sphere had been thrown back, so that two perfect halves of the whole, filled with Merlin knows what, were openly displayed.
"Wow," Caleb whispered under his breath, placing a hand around Marianne in pride.
But before any of them could step near, small golden spheres with fluttering flimsy wings began to zoom around them. More Snitches. They were flying in trained patterns, dancing before them in intricate ways, and Marianne was awed at the sheer amount of time and effort and charms her mother must have put into all this.
After circling them all, the Snitches went back to flutter over the opened sphere dancing again, and something else was lifted in the air. They looked like wooden fragments of a stick of wood, with several snapped twigs. "Rianne," she heard Caleb, "I think that's your dad's Nimbus 2000," he told her, referring to the father's first broom, which had been destroyed by the Whomping Willow in his third year of schooling. She nodded numbly.
The Snitches were flying so quickly that they were nothing but golden colored streaks zooming around each other, and then, as though it were a vision, among the streaking whizzes she could see a translucent image of her father, at age thirteen, on a broom in the middle of a horrible storm, players on brooms around him wearing Gryffindor and Hufflepuff colors.
The longer she stared, the clearer the image became, and as she watched her father racing with a good looking, much larger boy, she heard the muffled screams of an imaginary audience, Harry looked down, and she could practically see his happiness being drained as he lost consciousness, plummeting to the ground, the Nimbus 2000 losing height rapidly. And, while her father lay on the ground knocked out, the rain poring over him restlessly, the broom was swept away by a strong gust of wind, being thrashed directly at the Whomping Willow, being reduced to the shreds that were now going back into the sphere, replaced by a…doll of a dragon?
Around that dragon, appeared the image of Harry Potter summoning his Firebolt, whizzing around a mean looking dragon, performing amazing stunts to avoid serious injury, and finally getting past it to grab a golden egg, which, like pieces of broom before it, went back into the sphere to be replaced with the same golden egg that they'd just watched him grab.
And that showed Harry opening the aforementioned egg for the first time, a muted piercing Banshee like scream filling the air, then the image switched to one of Harry in what Marianne recognized as the Prefects bathroom, his head under the water along with the egg, which was singing a song about saving precious things.
And then the egg was replaced by a transparent four pointed star filled with something strongly resembling nail-polish, one of the tips deformed as though it had lived through a strong impact with something even more solid than its metallic plastic. And the image around it was of a battle scene, sloshed by heavy rain and lightning bolts, and in the midst of it a cloaked man with a white, almost scaly face, a flat nose, skeletal fingers, and glowing red eyes; his hands clenched under a girl's chin, trapping her in his hold. Her mother. And looking horrified before them were her father, along with Cicciobello. Harry erected a barrier of light around them as the cloaked figure insulted the young woman he held fast. In a moment of distraction the doll threw itself at the man in the same instant in which Hermione had pulled the star out of her robes, and threw it with all the strength in her body against her capturer's chest, embedding it there, and then, simultaneously, Harry and Hermione called out "Discerso Nubis" making two lightning bolts melt together, hitting their enemy with far too much force. The man fell.
And so did the Holostar.
The Snitches slowed down until they all stopped and returned to the open sphere, and silence ensued.
Nobody dared to move.
Marianne couldn't hear anything but her own heart thundering in its cage, feel nothing but the light sheen of sweat that had covered her brow, taste nothing but her parched mouth.
Numbly, she realized that Caleb had just laced his fingers through hers, and she drew strength and warmth from his hand.
"Rianne," called a wide eyed Gwen who was staring at the immobilized Snitches inside the sphere, "your mum's a genius." Sonya next to her, nodded, looking much like her sister did. And, for several seconds, nobody moved, or even attempted to breath.
Caleb gave Marianne's hand an encouraging squeeze and, trembling, she took a step toward the sphere and stood directly between the two halves of it. In one of it stood the objects that had just animated the air above, standing apart from the rest of the things in that half, which was mostly made of books. Caleb stepped next to her, and bent down to pick one up. Opening to the first page, he found many newspaper articles cut out and pasted there. The whole book was of newspaper articles. With a grin he turned to Marianne. "These are all about your parents."
She nodded numbly.
The insides of both halves of the spheres were completely covered in moving pictures, many of which were of Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ronald Weasley.
The other half was taken up completely by more of those translucent stars. Curious she picked one up. It was lighter than what she would have expected, but harder as well, and, in the point in which all the points met there was an indentation that seemed to be made for the tip of a wand. Holding the star in her left hand, she lifted her right to place the tip of her wand in the center of the indentation.
Instantly, another image, more like a hologram, took place before her eyes. It must have been from Ron's point of view, and it showed her parents at age seventeen in a Muggle kitchen (far too clean for sanity), spinning around, light coming out of their bodies and flooding everyone's field of vision.
The final defeat of Voldemort. She'd heard Ron tell the tale endlessly, though her parents hardly ever spoke of it. They said it was best to live for the present, not for the past, and, to them, Voldemort had been centuries ago.
"Oh, this must have been the first type of Holostars!" Exclaimed Gwen as she picked one up.
"Yeah!" Said Sonya. "Hermione practically invented them all on her own. She's the real reason why Uncle Fred and Uncle George are so rich now!"
Within minutes the whole class had been taken over by an excited chatter as they looked into the memories of Gryffindors who were before them, and, without knowing it, Marianne let their excitement influence her.
They spent the biggest part of the morning looking the Holostars, Caleb the only one with a real interest for the thick books that had been on the other side of the sphere, though several times he'd managed to catch everyone's attention with something amazing that the tomes that he'd been scrutinizing.
Somewhere around lunch time, Marianne heard him hiss her name urgently. "Rianne!"
Curious she sat next to him on the bolder he was occupying, and took the heavy, well kept, black, leather bound book he was offering. She raised her eyebrows in question. "Just open it," he told her with concealed excitement.
She did so, and stared flabbergasted at the words written there. In a penmanship that she recognized as her mother's, were etched black on white before her eyes.
The Hogwarts Chronicles of Harry Potter
By Hermione Lynn Granger
She felt her fingers tremble as she held the book. Was this what she thought it was?
It had to be! And with that she turned to the next page.
Before you go on and read this, whoever you are, I have one request.
I don't know if I'll be alive when this capsule is dug up out of the Forever Remember Garden. And I know that I could publish this myself this very moment, only a short time after the downfall of Voldemort, but I don't think the world is ready for it yet. I know that when the Diggorinta will pull out this the Garden, it will be because it knows that it's time.
So this is my request.
Please, once you've finished reading this yourself, if I still live, contact me and bring it back to me. If not, well, then I ask you to take this to a publishing house, so that the Wizarding world, and Muggle if some of them decide to put this on their market, will know the truth about who saved them, and how he did it.
She knew it was foolish, but she couldn't keep the tears from trailing hotly from her eyes.
Again, she felt Caleb take her hand, and she knew. She knew he understood.
This was her chance to know her parents the way she'd wanted to, to find out what happened.
It was her chance to feel proud of the fact that she was their daughter.
The Diggorinta gave another happy "Dig!" and made for Hagrid's hut.
The end.
Okay, there it is, hope you liked it. Tell me what you thought at Robbygal@hotmail.com or leave a review.
I'll love you all forever for reading this far
Pearl