"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are." — Carl Gustav Jung
"Evolution is not beautiful. On the contrary, it's ugly, but only through the ugliness can we reach life's true beauty." — Mobius, Honkai Impact 3rd
It didn't take long for Harriet to finally arrive. She glanced at the recently unconscious brunette and felt fairly confident she wasn't responsible for that particular state. "Good work, Mutsuko. You're the best."
She said this looking fondly at the miniature Gryffindor.
"Heh, it was nothing, honestly it was kind of exciting. When do we do it again?" Mutsuko said, standing proudly. Harriet couldn't resist the cuteness and pulled her into a brief hug before letting go and patting her head.
"You probably leveled up from this little operation, but things should calm down for a while now, so enjoy the victory while it lasts." She pulled a book from her pocket and handed it over. "Voodoo is genuinely fascinating, by the way. I finished reading it, and personally, I think it's going to solve quite a few of my problems. You should give it a try too."
"Amazing, thank you!" Mutsuko exclaimed.
"Oh, and before I forget." Harriet produced something else from her pocket, this time a blade with an ornate guard, the metal carrying a faint reddish sheen along the edge. "I'm not entirely sure, but apparently this one was forged with an infusion of dragon blood. I know you like to experiment with... well, with a lot of things, so consider it yours. Thanks for the help today."
Mutsuko threw herself at the blade with the enthusiasm of a true fanatic, examining it from every conceivable angle. "Thank you, Harriet!" She lunged forward to plant a quick kiss on Harriet's cheek before immediately returning to her examination of the weapon.
Harriet finally turned her attention to Hermione. "Don't worry, I don't usually hand out voodoo books and weapons to little girls. Well, you look fine, Hermione, all things considered." She said this while taking in Hermione's disheveled clothes and hair.
Hermione hadn't lifted her head since Harriet's arrival, but she said, clearly, "Thank you." A soft thank you, delivered in an exhausted tone. The whole ordeal had not been a particularly pleasant experience for her.
"Oh, please, think nothing of it. But shouldn't you be throwing yourself at me right about now, covering me in kisses? Show me a little something, at the very least. After all, Hermione, I just did exactly what the books written about me always promised. I finally rescued the damsel in distress from a thoroughly unpleasant situation, didn't I?" Harriet said, stepping closer, lifting two fingers under Hermione's chin to tilt her face up so she could finally look her in the eyes.
"Harriet, you... stop joking around in a situation like this, what happened was extremely serious!" Hermione said, in that familiar disapproving tone. "But thank you, for coming for me. Honestly, I wasn't sure you would, after everything. We're not exactly close anymore, are we."
"Well, of course I had to come, who knows what would have happened to you otherwise. We might not be especially close anymore, but that doesn't mean I'm just going to do nothing. Even if, from the very start, you could have avoided this trap entirely... And you're my friend anyway." Harriet said, with a flicker of genuine concern, before continuing in a noticeably lighter tone. "I didn't come alone. My small collaborator here was present too, after all." Harriet said. "Impressive, isn't she?"
Even if, from the very start, you could have avoided this trap entirely... Hermione lingered briefly on that thought, and on the concern underneath Harriet's words, before answering. "Yes, true, we're friends regardless. And she really is. She handled the last one entirely on her own. She's resourceful, if nothing else." Hermione said, still visibly impressed.
"In any case, situations like this have become fairly frequent lately. This is just the first time they've gone after someone other than me. I've been living with danger for a while now, Hermione, you know that as well as I do. So. My kiss and my happy ending, I'm still waiting." Harriet said, looking thoroughly smug.
Hermione, not yet fully recovered from the ordeal, or rather from the entirely separate ordeal that had just begun, with Harriet's humor steadily raising the tension, didn't think before responding. "They came for you. If I got dragged into this, it's because of you, in the first place! I knew it was dangerous being your friend, and you certainly didn't go easy on them, did you? Judging by the state of these two, the rest can't be in much better shape. When exactly did you become this violent? I don't even recognize you anymore!"
She was, by this point, bordering on hysteria.
At that, Harriet's gaze settled on her in complete silence. Even Mutsuko paused her ongoing fantasies about the various uses of her new blade long enough to look up, wisely choosing to say nothing.
Realizing what she'd just said, Hermione began to apologize. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean—" But before she could finish, Harriet cut in.
"No need to apologize. And frankly, I don't want your apology anyway. What I want is your thanks."
Harriet said this in a flat, neutral tone.
Hermione froze, not expecting that at all. "What do you mean by that?" she said, her voice edged with conflict.
Harriet leaned back against the same tree Hermione had been tied to earlier and said calmly, "No, you heard me perfectly well, Hermione. How much longer do you intend to keep up this hypocrisy? As though you haven't fully understood the situation. It's not simply that my presence puts you in danger, although it certainly does. But even without me, without the little 'adventures' you've been dragged into because of me, Hermione, without me and without my friendship, you wouldn't even exist anymore. And on top of that, you want to complain about the exact same people who almost certainly intended to torture you, kill you to keep you quiet, or worse, rape you. So yes, Hermione. Stop the hypocrisy. It's genuinely painful to watch at this point. And have I changed? Not particularly, deep down. But here's the thing, Hermione. Some people improve. They learn from their mistakes and they progress. I happen to be one of them. So tell me, little genius, exactly when did you stop progressing?"
"Stop calling me a hypocrite! Maybe I said some things I didn't entirely mean, but it's also not certain I would have been in danger at all if I hadn't been close to you." Hermione said, now seriously engaged, having nearly forgotten her anger and her fear, seeming instead almost curious about what Harriet was going to say next.
"You want to know something? The Dudleys were the worst. I'll skip the details, but the first time I scored better than their good little perfect Dudley, they screamed at me, because they couldn't stand the idea that their star son, even though he had the intellectual depth of a goldfish, could possibly do worse than the 'monster' they'd been forced to take in. A girl who, ultimately, wasn't 'their kind' anyway." Harriet said this in a slightly mocking tone, finishing on something almost ridiculous. "And you, Hermione, from the very start of school, you've been that exact same little 'monster.' You demolished, completely and decisively, every single one of those children raised from birth to be the best. The competition was supposed to be among themselves. Never against a simple 'Mudblood' like you. You know as well as I do that you would have disappeared, whether by your own hand or someone else's, were it not for my presence. And trust me, Dumbledore and the professors who follow his lead wouldn't have done a single thing about it. After all, those boys are 'just children who will learn from their mistakes.' Not that anyone's actually bothered correcting those mistakes under Saint Dumbledore's reign. But you already know all of this just as well as I do, Hermione. Don't you?"
"Dumbledore wouldn't have allowed something like that..." Hermione replied, her curiosity gone, that same protective facade she'd built for herself slipping back into place, the one she used to survive in the best possible version of the world she could convince herself existed.
"It doesn't matter either way. I came to save you because you would have been incapable of doing it yourself. And if on top of that you'd rather seek validation from important people instead, that's no longer my problem." Harriet said, straightening up and stepping closer to Hermione once more, looking her directly in the eyes.
"What exactly do you want from me." By this point Hermione had stopped fighting back and asked, somewhat helplessly, unable to counter a single one of Harriet's arguments.
"A thank you would have been a good start. But honestly, even that wouldn't mean much in the current context. So maybe... you could stop treating me like an idiot."
"Like an idiot? What do you mean by that?" Hermione asked, genuinely baffled now.
"I'm telling you I'm not an idiot. And either way, what exactly does it get you, Hermione, debasing yourself this much? To the point where you walk straight into the simplest possible trap. What's so wonderful about wanting to please absolutely everyone anyway?"
"I'm not sure..." Hermione said, knowing perfectly well that the mental obstacle she carried wasn't going to dissolve that easily. To survive comfortably in society, you adapted. Either by inflating your own worth when you fell short, or by deliberately shrinking yourself when you were too capable for the room. She was neither the first nor the last person to do this. But very few people who did it were as extraordinary as she was. After all, she was, without question, a genuine genius.
"You're asking what I want? I want my Hermione, the one who stands by my side. My friend who doesn't abandon me. Not because it's too dangerous, when handled properly you wouldn't have run into a single problem you couldn't handle. So there's my answer. I want my Hermione back. The one who shows up, briefly, in the rare moments she lets her guard down. The real one. The one who doesn't need anyone's approval to exist."
Harriet said this with a kind of determination that hadn't existed in her, even a few years ago.
"I'm not sure I can..." Hermione said, her head and arms hanging low now.
"I suspected as much. Come on, let's get out of the forest, I'll walk you back." Harriet said this without any urgency whatsoever. She was fairly confident it would come, eventually. There was a French expression she'd picked up during her trip, something about chasing nature out the door only for it to come galloping right back in. Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop. Fitting, in this case.
Society chains you, regardless. Fall short and you're penalized. Exceed expectations and you're penalized just as harshly, in every single domain. It was a genuine misery, no question about it, but at the same time, if there were too much freedom, if everyone could simply be whatever they wanted and do whatever they pleased without consequence, the result would be chaos. The self against the world, and too many selves will make the world crumble. No one could ever fully escape that, regardless of what you were. Human, yokai, demon, angel, god, it made no difference. But you could always take a step forward and remove one fundamental chain. That was what she herself had done, in the shock of her own rebirth. It was even what Mutsuko had done, in her own way, through her unrestrained chuunibyou, although Mutsuko was, admittedly, an outlier in every sense. It was people like her, the ones who edged closer to their true selves, who often ended up freer than everyone else, even if that freedom carried a greater share of danger with it.
Every great person who ever changed the world had to break at least one chain that society placed upon them and that does not mean absolving ourselves of all responsibility, but rather gaining a clearer understanding of ourselves and the role we have chosen to take within the world.
Hermione, by virtue of her own genius, had chained herself more fiercely than most. And the problem, if it could even be called that, was that Hermione alone held the keys to the chains binding her. No one else could simply hand her that particular freedom, no matter how much they might want to. Knowing precisely what was wrong with you was, it turned out, an entirely different exercise from actually fixing it.
When Hermione had decided, one year ago, that staying close to Harriet was "too dangerous," the danger itself had only ever been half the truth. The other half was something neither of them had ever said aloud. Proximity to Harriet meant being constantly confronted with her own limits, because Harriet never stopped moving forward, and staying beside her meant having to move forward too. That was the real fear. Not curses or kidnappings, but the unbearable pressure of growth itself.
And the second half of it was simpler, and harder to fight precisely because of that. It was instinct. An unconscious flinch away from discomfort, the kind that didn't respond to logic no matter how sound the logic happened to be.
Both of them understood this, on some level. Which made the entire situation, in its own quiet way, something close to an impasse.
Harriet wasn't in a hurry. If she succeeded, she succeeded. If she failed, she failed. Everyone had their own battle to fight. But if she succeeded, Harriet would get back a formidable ally, and more importantly, a real friend.
"Mutsuko, let's go." Harriet said, turning to Mutsuko, who had gone back to playing with her new blade and had already begun fitting it into the release mechanism on her sleeve, the same one Harriet had seen earlier in the year and had assumed was malfunctioning. She decided she didn't particularly want to know what Mutsuko was planning to do with her newfound voodoo knowledge. It has far more applications than she'd ever assumed.
"Coming!" Mutsuko called out. "So. No character awakening, then?" she whispered to Harriet, not quite quietly enough for Hermione to miss it, unfortunately.
"No awakening." Harriet replied softly, and the two of them walked ahead together, with Hermione trailing slightly behind, still caught somewhere deep in her own thoughts.
"Thank you, both of you, regardless. I... I won't make a mistake that stupid again." Hermione said, having finally decided to speak, clumsily trying to find the right thing to say.
Both of them told her it was nothing, and it seemed to do the trick. The three of them drew a little closer together after that, not quite back to where they used to be, but close enough for one evening.
And so the trio made their way toward the castle, admiring the forest along the way, with Mutsuko discovering it for the first time, having spent too much time inside the castle to ever venture out here before. For now, at least, the three of them could talk and laugh together, leaving behind an absolutely monstrous mess for a certain Potions professor to deal with.