Hermione Granger sat at her desk at work, absentmindedly winding a lock of hair around her finger while she frowned at the printout in front of her, trying to find the error in the calculations. On the desk beside hers, currently unoccupied, a magi-PC mumbled softly to itself as it chewed through another set of calculations.

In the office around her magical and Muggle equipment jostled for space on the shelves. Older wizards visiting this, the front research office for Caliburn Inc., tended to eye this conglomeration uneasily, as if afraid the Muggle components would contaminate them somehow or drain them of magic. But if they ventured here once they usually came back.

At thirty, barely more than a child by wizarding standards, Hermione Granger was almost a household name. Certainly every serious scholar of magic knew of her, even if it was only to heap condemnation on her for her new and radical thinking. Not that Hermione cared for their curses any more than she would have cared for their praise: she knew she was, if not right, definitely on the right path. And the people who mattered to her agreed with her.

Suddenly spotting the mistake, Hermione dropped the lock of hair and grabbed a quill to start making notes on the printout. The magi-PC hummed on placidly, while from somewhere in the distance someone said “Rats!” Neither disturbed her.

At her elbow sat what looked like a crystal ball enclosing a living flame that burnt steadily in the confines of the glass. As she paused, reading back over what she’d written, the fire turned green, unnoticed, and there was a low sound like a gong being struck. Hermione looked around to see a face in the flames.

Smiling, she picked up the orb and held it in front of her. “Neville! Oh no, don’t tell me we’re late!”

The flickering image of Neville Longbottom smiled. At thirty he’d lost his puppyfat and gained a quiet but boundless confidence, but there was still in his face a hint of the round-faced boy he’d once been. “I won’t say it if you don’t want me to,” he said cheerfully, “but that won’t make it any less true.”

“Sorry!” Hermione said, hastily tiding up her desk with one hand. “It’s just that we’re making progress on the—”

“Hermione, I don’t care if you’ve discovered the panacea to cure all earthly ills, it’s Thursday and that means it’s our night and—”

“I know, I know. Give us ten minutes, okay?”

“Okay. And don’t worry, whatever you’re working on you can tell us all about over dinner.”

Hermione grinned. “You’ll regret that.”

“Ten minutes, Hermione. Or I’ll send the aurors after you.” His image vanished and the fire returned to its natural colour.

Hermione put the orb down and made a final note on her printout. It was natural that she should have an orb for she was one of its inventors, but a lot of older, more traditional wizards refused to use them since they weren’t a part of traditional wizarding life. Still, the older they got the more likely they were to decide that the orbs weren’t so bad (“I’m far too old to kneel with my head in a fireplace when I want to talk to someone,” Anscom Aldridge had declared, accepting his orb gratefully). The orbs (Hermione had wanted to call them palantirs, in a reference few wizards would have got, but Harry’s name was the one that stuck) used the same principles as floo powder, just modified and enhanced for this specific task with an ingenuity on permitted by the recent total reconstruction of Magical Theory. Fifteen years after its first entry into the magical world the new Theory was still being hotly debated and viciously derided by many; it would take, at Hermione’s estimate, several generations to even begin to be accepted but the few, mostly younger, researchers using it as a basis for their work were already seeing vast potential in it.

Not that Hermione was worried about anything so scholarly at that moment. “Harry!” she called through the recessed lab door. “Harry, we’re late! Hurry up, the Minister’s waiting!”

Harry appeared at the doorway after a moment, taking off his lab coat and hanging it on the wall in the lab before stepping into the recess between the lab and the office and pausing there so that the lab wards could cleanse him of magic and contaminants. “You’re never gonna get tired of saying that, are you?” he asked with a grin.

Hermione laughed. “Not a chance. It sounds far more impressive than ‘Neville’s waiting’, don’t you think?”

Harry swiftly tidied the papers on his desk, checking the progress his magi-PC had made in its work before leaving it to continue overnight. “Actually, I’d be more likely to hurry for Neville than for the Minister,” he said wryly. After the Minister for Magic of his school days, one Cornelius Fudge, had tried to use the Boy Who Lived for his campaigning Harry had conceived a long and unending dislike for the Ministry in general. Despite close links to both the current and the previous Minister.

Hermione just smiled. “Anyway, I like saying Minister Longbottom. Our best friend is the youngest Minister for Magic ever. Isn’t that worth boasting about?” Her smile darkened. “Besides, I still remember Mrs Longbottom’s ‘You think you can be Minister?’ as if it was the most unlikely thing in the world. It’s just lucky we had Neville for most of the year while he was at school and she didn’t have much of a chance to undo our good work. I just wish she’d lived long enough to see that we were right about him all along.”

“She missed her son,” Harry said placatingly as he turned off the lights. They shrugged their coats on as they went outside.

“That’s no excuse for unloading it all on Neville,” Hermione told him, activating the security wards before storing her wand in her wrist holster.

“No, it’s not. But she’s dead now, Hermione, and Neville’s fine. You managed to forgive Tom for being Voldemort, can’t you forgive Mrs Longbottom for being ill-equipped to deal with what happened to her son?”

With a sigh she admitted, “You’re right.”

“I’m always right.” She instantly scoffed, wringing a grin out of him. “No wait, that was you, wasn’t it?”

“Except for when I’m wrong.” She slipped her hand through Harry’s arm and apparated them both to the house in Hogsmeade that would always be for Harry, no matter how far he roamed, Home.

Minerva opened the door before they could know, smiling at them. “Come in, come in, everyone else is already here. Severus says dinner will be about quarter of an hour.”

“He’s not let Neville near it, has he?” Harry asked in concern as he and Hermione shucked off their coats.

Minerva laughed. “I can assure you, Harry, Severus is much too sensible for that.” Neville, despite all his best efforts, simply wasn’t capable of cooking. With tuition from Severus and Tom he’d earned an O on his Potions NEWT but no amount of tuition seemed to help with cooking.

“You can’t laugh,” Harry told Hermione, hanging up their coats. “The best you can do is boil an egg.”

“And potatoes,” she protested, still smiling.

“Well, with eggs and potatoes at least you won’t starve,” Minerva teased.

“Of course I won’t, that’s what Neville and I have Harry for.”

Harry elbowed her as the pair followed Minerva down the hall into the large kitchen-and-dining room, where Severus was busy with multiple pots and pans while Tom and Neville sat at the dining table playing exploding snap. The thaumatelly (another Caliburn Inc. creation) was on but muted and no one was paying it any attention.

All three men looked up at their entrance and uttered a chorus of welcoming greetings. Harry’s eyes twinkled. “I know I’m wonderful,” he declared, “but I still don’t know why everyone’s so happy to see me. I saw all of you last Thursday. That’s only a week ago! And I see Hermione every day because we work together. Neville I see most days because he lives in the same house as us. On... Monday, it was, wasn’t it? Severus was helping us clean the newest lot of researchers off the walls – and how they managed to explode a golf ball I still haven’t figured out – and yesterday Tom stopped by because he was bored—”

“Or because I needed your signature on several contracts,” said Tom sotto voce, who was the CEO of Caliburn Inc.

Harry ignored this. “—and then—” He stopped and adopted a hurt look. “Minerva,” he said, wounded, “don’t you love me any more? You didn’t come to see me this week.”

“When have I ever claimed to love you?” she retorted.

“Well, there was that time after I—”

Since he seemed perfectly willing to start enumerating occasions, Minerva hastily cut him off. “Never mind. Besides, young man, we spent all of Sunday together at that orphanage fundraiser.”

Harry shuddered. “I’d been trying to forget that,” he complained. Though he made good use of his fame to promote worthy causes, Harry had never liked his Boy Who Lived title and although with these few close friends gathered here he was bright and laughing, he still found it difficult to truly trust people. Severus had a couple of times commented that Harry seemed to find it easier to accept hate than adoration; he knew what to do with hate – he ignored it – but had no idea what to do with the latter.

“Oh, sit down and shut up,” Neville told him, laughing.

“Before Severus starts comparing you to your father,” Tom agreed cheerfully.

As Harry hastily obeyed, dragging Hermione down to sit beside him, Severus brought over a bottle of wine and Minerva poured out drinks for them all. “How are your parents?” she asked Hermione as she set the wine bottle down.

“They’re good.” Hermione looked around the table. “You’re still all coming to their anniversary celebration, are you?” She gained a chorus of agreement and smiled. “Good. Thanks,” she added when Minerva passed her a glass of wine.

“A toast!” Tom declared, accepting his glass.

Neville rolled his eyes. “Do we have to have a toast every week?” he asked, grinning.

“You started it,” Harry pointed out.

“Only because Tom got voted in! That was supposed to be a one-time thing!”

“Sorry, Neville,” Minerva smiled, “this isn’t magic. Intention doesn’t count and we can still blame you.”

Severus laughed and lifted his glass. “To magic.”

“To wisdom,” Hermione responded.

“To laughter,” Tom declared.

“To learning,” was Neville’s contribution.

“To family,” Minerva added.

Harry grinned and stood, raising his glass high. “To us!”

“To us!” the others chorused.

What could have been a fine and noble moment of shared camaraderie was interrupted by Severus’s sudden yelp of “Damn, it’s burning!” The others laughed as he jumped up and ran to the stove to snatch the overeager pot off the range. With Harry’s help dinner was soon served (and not, despite Severus’s grumblings, at all blackened). The six of them sat around the table just as they had done for nearly two decades, laughing and talking and arguing merrily as the old family they were.

After Voldemort’s rebirth minus the Dark rituals he had been introduced back into the wizarding world as Thomas Snape, Severus’s long-lost brother, and because of the blood brother’s ritual, the testing spells had agreed with them. Tom was then granted custody of one Harry Potter on the grounds that they were obviously related (actually, it was just his magic on Harry that made the spells think it was so; Muggle scientists would have seen that they weren’t related, but wizards believed in their magic and didn’t question it). Dumbledore would have tried to prevent this happening for Dumbledore-ish reasons, but he’d been let into the secret of Harry’s magiclessness (the group had taken great pleasure in requiring a secrecy vow of him for the information) and been convinced that there was no point in keeping Harry at Hogwarts.

Not that the magical world knew, even nineteen years later, that Harry was a squib; as far as they were concerned, Harry had been taken out of Hogwarts by his guardian so that he could have special training. Harry and Tom had taken a house in Hogsmeade, with Harry given special permission to roam the Hogwarts grounds with the other children. Meanwhile he had been taught both Muggle and magical subjects, taking correspondence courses in the former and having Tom’s tutoring in the latter in between Tom’s work for the Ministry. Back at Hogwarts Hermione had absentmindedly done her school work but, bored, set about rewriting Magical Theory, with help from her parents and the other five.

After Hogwarts Neville had joined Tom at the Ministry but Harry and Hermione had both gone to Muggle university (Hermione, of course, was unable to settle and had managed to acquire three PhDs, but Harry had been more than satisfied with one). While they were there Tom, unable to restrain the quixotic impulses that had led to his descent into Dark magic, found himself as Minister for Magic, putting his charisma and charm to good use this time, changing things from the inside out and paving the way for, after ten years, Neville to succeed him. He’d stepped down happily because Harry and Hermione had become the first wizard scientists and needed someone to take charge of their company, Caliburn Inc., while they did the research. His taking over the day to day running allowed them to focus on revolutionising how magic was understood, taught, and used, while creating marvellous new inventions that the magical world, mired in tradition, had never before considered.

And now here they were. Neville was Minister for Magic, not instigating sweeping reforms but quietly and subtley working to change the very nature of society, quietly doing away with concepts of blood purity, halfbreed racism, and house elf enslavement without people even noticing the changes. It would be at least a hundred years before anyone stopped to realise things were different, but that was fine. Neville wasn’t a loud person who needed the world to cheer him on, he was just happy knowing he was making a difference.

Minerva was Headmistress of Hogwarts in all but name, Dumbledore having become rather feeble over the years, and much beloved by her students, creating a new, united Hogwarts by minimising house rivalries and guiding the students in much the same way as Neville was guiding their world so that changes would come even faster. As Tom had realised in his first, less successful rise to power, it was with the young that changes could be easiest and best made.

Tom was CEO of Caliburn Inc., now a major force in the wizarding world and employing more workers than any other company save the Ministry itself. Under his guidance the company had blossomed and expanded despite a great deal of opposition from the hardline traditionalists, of which there were rather a lot in the magical world. Harry and Hermione were the lead researchers and driving force behind Caliburn Inc., and Severus was cheerfully and bitingly in charge of the Potions Division of Caliburn Inc.

Albus Dumbledore waited patiently for Voldemort’s inevitable return, keeping an eye on Harry to make sure he was primed to become the hero at need. He was still waiting patiently at the hour of his death, and never knew that that charming Thomas Snape was in fact the man he was waiting for.

Harry, Severus, Hermione, Neville, Minerva, and Tom all stayed very close throughout their lives, squabbling and teasing and arguing and supporting just as families should. And, on average, they all lived happily ever after.