The chaos that had just erupted left Diagon Alley that had only barely begun to recover its foot traffic after the war, once again deserted.
Bryan led the small group of young witches and wizards down the street.
The thoroughfare presented a picture of desolation that felt, after everything that had happened in the last few hours, almost gentle by comparison.
Along both sides of the road, a good number of shops had slammed their doors and fled the moment the marching crowd had knocked down the dividing walls—shopkeepers who had survived one battle for this alley already and had no intention of testing their luck against a second one, however different in character.
Shutters were down. A few hastily abandoned display tables sat skewed where they'd been left mid-arrangement, goods were still scattered across them.
Bryan brought the anxious little band to the Leaky Cauldron.
The vast pub was empty of customers.
Tom, however, was in remarkably good spirits despite the silence. He had done brisk business that afternoon—the Ministry had spent a tidy sum ordering lunch and refreshments for the marching crowd, a contract that had presumably made the eventual quiet hour considerably easier to bear.
He stood behind the bar, humming a cheerful, formless tune to himself, polishing a row of glasses.
"Oh! Mr. Watson?"
The sight of the party stepping through the door made Tom's eyes light up at once.
With the sprightliness of a man easily half his age, he darted out from behind the bar abandoning the glass he'd been polishing mid-stroke and planted himself directly in front of Bryan with eager, slightly breathless energy.
"Might I have the honour of buying you a drink, Mr. Watson? To celebrate your magnificent victory just now? The whole alley's talking about it already, what you did out there—"
"Oh—" Bryan chuckled warmly. "I only came in for a bite to eat, Tom, but all right. Twist my arm. A sherry for me, please—plain, if you have it."
He turned and glanced over his shoulder at the row of students trailing behind him, each one wearing some variation of nervous anticipation.
"—and five orange juices."
Tom bustled off toward the bar with visible enthusiasm, humming his tune again, delighted to have a task and a customer worth the fuss.
"Sit down, all of you."
Bryan surveyed the room and chose a table by the window. He pushed two tables together with a single gesture, settled into his seat, and then gestured for Harry and the others to join him.
"How's the holiday homework coming along?"
Bryan laced his fingers together, rested them on a crossed knee, and observed the little group of witches and wizards who had drawn themselves up very stiffly with a calm gaze.
Everyone gave an affirmative answer. Only Harry and Ron replied with their heads sheepishly tucked toward their chests, mumbling something that qualified as agreement while avoiding eye contact.
They weren't lying, strictly speaking. They had, in fact, finished the homework. It was simply that the moment Hermione had left for her holiday in Dijon, the quality of their work had plummeted sharply.
A silence fell over the table.
Looking at the small, stiff figures arranged before him struck dumb, and several of them visibly holding their breath, Bryan found himself drifting, briefly, into something like reverie.
He had never thought of himself as someone who particularly enjoyed projecting authority. Not in front of students. Not in front of adult wizards, for that matter, however senior or however nervous they happened to be in his presence.
And yet, as his reputation had grown across the past two years as the stories accumulated, as the Battle of Diagon Alley and a dozen bigger and smaller, less publicised victories built themselves into something like a legend, more and more people had begun to fall into a posture of deference around him, whether they consciously intended to or not.
In the several weeks he had served as Amelia's advisory counsel, he had encountered wizards, experienced, senior, capable wizards who became so nervous in his presence that they could barely string together a coherent sentence.
He had watched men twice his age fumble through routine briefings as though appearing before a tribunal.
He sighed, quietly, internally.
He had no real grounds for casting blame elsewhere, either. He had grown increasingly accustomed, across these past two years, to carrying a particular air of seriousness in public settings, a kind of default gravity that had become, without his fully intending it.
In that respect, he thought, watching Dumbledore handle similar situations over the years, their old headmaster was far more adept at it than he was—Dumbledore could put on gravity and take it off again as the moment required, he could be terrifying in one conversation and twinkling and grandfatherly in the next with a fluidity that Bryan had not yet managed to develop.
Which presumably explained why five teenagers were currently sitting before him as though awaiting sentencing.
"We're sorry, Professor!"
Hermione shot to her feet with a scrape of her chair; her face was crumpled with remorse.
Harry followed almost instantly, rising half a beat behind her, his expression was equally stricken.
Luna rose next more slowly, with less urgency in the motion. Her clear, unworldly eyes, which had carried their typical distant calm through everything from a riot to a near-detonation, now held a rare and visible unease.
Ron and Lavender were a beat behind the others as Ron's reaction was delayed by genuine confusion about whether he was meant to be confessing to anything, Lavender's by the simple fact that she had only the vaguest understanding of what had actually happened earlier in the afternoon but they too lifted anxiously from their bench, following the room's gathering momentum.
Bryan raised an eyebrow and said nothing.
"I shouldn't have made Harry pretend to be kidnapped by Luna," Hermione said, pressing her lips together hard, her shame was plain on her face.
"And I shouldn't have used Polyjuice Potion to take on Uncle John's appearance and infiltrate the march," Luna added, owning her own part in turn.
Bryan's expression shifted into something closer to exasperated amusement.
He hadn't yet so much as opened his mouth to demand an accounting of any kind, and here these two had already produced full, clean, voluntary confessions, while practically racing each other to it.
Tom came trotting back over with his tray, balanced expertly despite his haste, and set the drinks down on the table with a series of soft clicks.
And with remarkable tact for a man who had clearly noticed the unusual picture of five standing, stricken teenagers and Bryan Watson watching them with raised eyebrows, he said not a single word, gave a small discreet bow and retreated quickly back toward the bar.
"Sit down."
Bryan picked up his sherry glass and ran his fingertips slowly along its cool, crystalline surface for a moment, considering. Then, after a brief pause for thought he said:
"To be young is to have the right to make mistakes."
Professor Watson did not scold them for their impulsiveness, as every one of them had clearly braced themselves to receive. He spoke calmly, without reproach.
"The wise, however, learn to draw something useful from each mistake and in doing so, grow from it. That is the entire difference between an error that costs you and an error that teaches you. The mistake itself is rarely the problem."
Harry lowered his head in shame. He was quite certain that he did not belong to the category of the wise that Professor Watson was describing, given his demonstrated track record of running directly into danger without pausing to calculate the odds.
Bryan, watching the row of guilty faces before him, had no real wish to be too hard on these children.
After all, their intentions had been good—better than good, in Luna's case, given that she had risked her own safety entirely on behalf of a family she barely knew.
And as for the reckless streak that had produced Hermione's plan and Luna's execution of it that was, in Bryan's assessment, an inherited affliction among Gryffindor students.
He could hardly expect them to be born, as he had been, with an innately calm and calculating temperament.
Besides if Harry and the others ever did genuinely learn to weigh circumstances and calculate consequences before acting, that outcome would create its own new set of problems.
"Let's consider the matter closed."
Bryan brought the glass to his lips and took a small sip, letting the clean, gentle warmth of the sherry unfold across his palate before continuing.
He exhaled slowly afterward and then turned his gaze, with a deliberate shift in both posture and attention, onto Hermione.
"As it happens, there's something I've been meaning to discuss with you for some time now. The Ministry's affairs simply kept getting in the way of finding the moment."
Hermione's heart, which had only just begun to settle back into its ordinary rhythm after the confession and the relief of Bryan's mild response, leapt straight back into her throat.
She blinked her faintly damp lashes and stared at Professor Watson with the nervous attention.
Harry and Ron immediately turned their curious eyes onto her as well, equally caught off guard.
"That organisation you founded—ah—"
The memory was, evidently, a touch hazy for him. Bryan pressed two fingers briefly to his forehead, concentrating for a moment.
"Yes. The Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare." He recovered the full name with satisfaction. "Do you still intend to continue with it?"
In an instant, Harry and Ron's mouths fell open in identical, silent astonishment.
Professor Watson had sought Hermione out specifically to discuss that club of hers? The very idea seemed faintly absurd on its face, and hearing it actually said aloud, in this empty pub, by this particular man, somehow made it sound no less absurd than it had in their heads.
Even Hermione herself had not remotely anticipated this turn in the conversation. Her expression froze for a long moment before she collected herself.
"Oh, I absolutely intend to continue it, Professor!"
Ignoring the bewildered looks on Ron's and Harry's faces, looks that clearly communicated you cannot possibly be about to launch into this right now—Hermione sat up straighter with a sudden, fresh surge of energy, her excitement was spilling out faster than she could fully organise it.
"Professor Watson, I already have a new plan worked out for how to draw more students into the movement to liberate house-elves from their—their internalised slave mentality!"
"Oh?" Bryan looked genuinely intrigued and leaned very slightly forward. "Tell me."
Hermione drew a breath and let it out in a rush, her eyes were shining with brightness.
"I've come to realise that teaching house-elves to advocate for their own rights and interests is a long and arduous road—one I genuinely cannot travel alone, however committed I am personally. I need to win more people over to the cause."
"But as I understand it—" Bryan said, casting a leisurely, faintly amused glance toward Ron and Harry, who were both straining to keep their expressions neutral and failing, "—you've already tried to win more support for this cause. With, shall we say, somewhat limited success thus far?"
"That's because I went about it the wrong way the first time, Professor."
Hermione shot a brief, sharp sidelong look at Harry and Ron.
"Helping house-elves awaken to their own situation is thankless, difficult, work. I shouldn't have expected everyone to throw themselves into it wholeheartedly. So I've decided to change my approach."
With that, she reached into the inner pocket of her robes and produced a coin purse, setting it on the table between them with a small clink. It was the one containing thousand Galleons she had withdrawn from Gringotts.
"Oh!" Ron stared first at the purse, and then at Hermione, his expression was cycling rapidly through several stages of disbelief. "Have you completely lost your mind? You're going to empty your entire savings—for house-elves?!"
"Precisely," Hermione said, lifting her chin.
"I intend to pay every person willing to join the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare and contribute real effort. And for anyone who achieves a meaningful breakthrough, I'll offer a bonus on top of that, Professor."
"If you hand out bonuses like that, they'll be gone in an instant, Hermione," Harry said honestly. It had never occurred to him that the large sum she'd withdrawn from Gringotts was meant for something like this.
"Obviously I'll be interviewing every applicant carefully before they join, Harry—to make sure no one's signing up purely to collect a wage for showing up and doing nothing of substance."
"Be realistic, Hermione." Ron shook his head. "There's simply no reliable way to tell who's genuinely committed to the cause and who's just an excellent actor pretending to care because there's money involved."
Their friends' visible lack of support was beginning to make Hermione genuinely indignant. She opened her mouth to retort—
"In that case… might I join your organisation, Hermione?"
"Oh, of course—I'd welcome it more than anything!"
The words were out of Hermione's mouth before she had given herself even half a second to think them through. She had answered with pure, reflexive, entirely genuine delight at the prospect of any new recruit but the instant the sentence left her, the actual identity of the person who had just asked caught up with her all at once.
"You—you—you want to join, Professor?!"
Was this—was this some kind of joke?
Not only Hermione—Harry and Ron wore identically haunted expressions, as though they had seen a dementor.
"Yes, you heard me correctly."
Bryan gave a nod as a smile settled onto his face.
"So then—would you be willing to accept me into your organisation, Hermione? Into the…" He paused, as though double-checking the name once more against his memory.
"The Society for the Welfare of Sentient Magical Beings, was it?"
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