Last but not least. I hope you've enjoyed reading this story as much as I've enjoyed writing it. I had to work hard to keep this chapter from devolving into a litany of my headcanons about what Hogwarts life looks like after the war. And for those of you saying you ship it, well. Truth be told, I kind of do, too, which is a weird stance for me. I kinda stumbled into it backwards. I'm still a hardcore Ron/Hermione shipper, but I absolutely ship these two in an alternate universe where they became friends first year.

Anyway. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy this last little bit!

Justin had received news in Kent of Voldemort's defeat a few days after it had happened. The end of the first week of May, he'd gotten a call from Daniel that there was a package at the townhouse. He'd been stunned to see Professor McGonagall waiting for him.

Once assured of everyone's safety, Justin had lifted the protections from both houses, contacted all the families of his charges, and spent the summer seeing everyone back home safely. He assured students and parents alike that they would be welcomed back to Hogwarts in September, and that the danger that had threatened them was past. Where needed, he promised that he himself would fetch the student in question on August 31, host them at the Kent house overnight, and personally see them onto the train to school.

Some parents insisted that their children would never return to school. Justin heard them out with patience and sympathy, and then quietly informed them that he would be returning, and he would continue to watch over their children at school if minds were changed. On September first, Justin escorted his group of Muggleborns proudly to the station.

Returning to Hogwarts broke Justin's heart a little. He was thrilled to be back, but the scars of the war were obvious as he came up the drive. Repairs had clearly been made, but the grounds were torn up, the gates had been destroyed, and there were areas of the castle that would be unusable for the school year. But it was open for education, the Death Eaters were gone, and the students he had sheltered the past year were home where they belonged. With those things being true, they could all adjust to a new definition of normal.

He'd been a little worried, coming in, that no one else from his year would opt to return. Professor McGonagall had made it clear to all those who would have graduated the previous year that they were welcome to come and redo their seventh year, but the seventh years in question had a lot of offers like that. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement had invited any of-age wizard to join the Auror Force on a three-year contract, no N.E.W.T.s required. Other departments in the Ministry had instituted similar offers. There was a lot of rebuilding to be done all across the wizarding world.

But Ernie and Hannah had found him on the train. Looking around the Great Hall at the Sorting Feast, he saw a handful of others from their year, and breathed easier. Ernie and Hannah filled him in on the missing - who had taken a Ministry offer, who had disappeared without explanation, and who hadn't made it through the war.

"And Hermione?" he asked, trying to sound casual. They hadn't mentioned her alongside Harry and Ron, both working for the Aurors, but she also wasn't in Great Hall.

"I'm not sure about Hermione," Hannah said with a frown. "She helped the Aurors a bit over the summer, but Neville told me she wasn't joining them long-term. I thought for sure she'd be back, but I guess she found a better offer. I'm sure she had plenty."

He tried not to feel disappointed. It wasn't like Hermione owed him anything. They hadn't even spoken since the day she'd cast the Fidelius Charm for him. Maybe he'd made it weird in that last moment. No, scratch that. There was no maybe involved. He'd made it weird. You didn't caress the face of a purely platonic friend, even if you weren't certain you'd ever see them again. He'd made it weird, and she didn't want to talk to him, and that's why she'd told McGonagall how to find Daniel rather than send a letter or call him herself. He'd made it weird, and he should have made it clear that in no version of the world did he actually expect to have a chance with her; his plan was always to push the feelings down and pretend they didn't exist until they went away or he died.

It really didn't matter, he told himself with a firm shake of the head. She was off doing whatever incredibly important thing needed her brilliance the most, and he was probably reading far too much into everything. Chances were good that her absence in reality had nothing whatsoever to do with him, that she was just so busy and so important and so needed that she hadn't thought of him beyond making sure someone told him things were done.

He pushed it to the back of his mind as best he could. He could still write to her, after all. She'd find time for him, because she always had. He would just wait a few days, until the school year was underway and he had substantial, important things to write about.

On the third day of classes, he left a meeting with the newly instated Muggle Studies teacher, Professor Douglas, practically skipping with excitement. He was heading straight to his dorm because now, now, he had something worthwhile to write to her about, something that seemed like the perfect culmination of all the years they'd known each other.

He was halfway down the corridor when a voice called out, "Justin!"

He spun on his heel instantly, staring in disbelief at a view he had to be making up. "Hermione?" And then she was grinning and running to him and throwing her arms around him with an enthusiasm that was catching.

"It is so good to see you!" she said into his ear, and those words, and her greeting, were everything, washing away every insecurity of the past week.

He returned her embrace fiercely, then pulled back and held her at arms' length, taking a good look at her. She was noticeably thinner than she had been last June, her skin a few shades darker. There was a thin scar on her neck that made him angry to see. But she was here, and smiling, and whole, and that was something. "It's great to see you, too. When you weren't on the train or at the Welcome Feast, I thought you'd decided to go be important somewhere, with one of the many places I'm sure is clamoring for you," he said. "But you - you are back, aren't you? You're a student this year?"

"Oh, yes," she reassured him instantly. "Yes, of course. Coming back felt too important, you know? Plenty of people wanted me to go work for them, but I want to be sure of who I am and what I want before I launch myself into the workforce. I was always coming back, but I told the Order and the Aurors that I'd help as I could through the summer. And then the Aurors needed someone who had contacts in Australia, which I do because of getting my parents refugee status there. It was sudden, and took longer than originally anticipated. But I got in today, and I'm so excited to be back."

"Your parents took refuge in Australia?" he asked.

"Yes! As soon as you mentioned it, it was the perfect solution. They weren't going to go; I actually had to modify their memories, which just felt awful, Justin, but I couldn't see another way to guarantee keeping them safe. I actually rushed down there almost as soon as the battle was over, to get them and remove the charm, because the longer it's on, the more risk of damage. I didn't even think about you all until I was there, and I didn't know if I could get an owl through, and phoning was going to be a nightmare, so I sent McGonagall. I hope you got word quickly?"

"Yeah," he said with a nod. "A few days after everything went down. I'm honestly impressed you thought of us at all."

"Well, of course I did," she said, sounding surprised. "Have you eaten? Or - you're not on your way to a class or anything, are you? I really want to sit and catch up."

"No proper classes til next week," he told her. "They're doing individual assessments so they can place everyone correctly for each subject, given how disruptive last year was for everyone. Let's get lunch."

They headed down to the Great Hall and slid into two empty seats at the Hufflepuff table. "So," Hermione said as their food appeared, "tell me everything about your safe house and how it went."

"We ended up housing nineteen," he told her. "I didn't have any real expectations, going in, but I was pleased with how many wanted to be there, still studying and staying as connected as we were able. All ages. Well, I was the only one from our year, but we had students from every other year. The sixth years and I kind of took charge of teaching everyone else. McGonagall even gave me the names of the kids who should have started last year. I got three of them to hole up with us. We couldn't do any actual magic, but we taught theory and incantations and the basics of magical life."

"And you kept them safe," she added. He smiled.

"Yeah. We kept them safe."

"How did your mother handle everything?"

"Oh, fantastically," he said with a laugh. "Truly, much better than I thought she might. I'm actually a little worried about how she's going to cope with suddenly having no one around. I keep encouraging all the Etonites to write to her-"

"Wait, I'm sorry," Hermione interrupted. "Did I hear you right? The Etonites?"

Justin laughed. "Yeah. Second week of the school year proper, after the first years joined us, the older kids decided we needed to be our own House, since we couldn't do a Sorting for the new three. Well, the week before, Bonnie Sedgwick - she's a third year Ravenclaw - had a bit of a panic attack about what she was supposed to do if the Death Eaters won and we were never allowed to return to the magical world. And my mother-" Here he raised his eyes heavenward with a shake of his head. "My mother says to her, 'Well, there's always Eton.'"

Hermione let out an incredulous laugh. "She said that? Your mother? I mean, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, the number of times she said it to you over the years, but to a young witch?"

Justin chuckled at the memory. "Yeah. And I was on the verge of hauling her out of the room to light into her - and she winked at me. My own mother. She'd done it on purpose, because it was such a ridiculous sentiment that it pulled Bonnie right out of her spiral and made her laugh. And that became the joke, when things got overwhelming. There's always Eton. So when they needed a House, they dubbed themselves the Etonites."

"Okay," Hermione said after a second. "I actually love that."

"Right? It's pretty great. I think they're gonna be okay, I really do. And I-" He broke off, glancing down, wondering how honest to be. But then, he reminded himself, this was Hermione. If he couldn't be completely honest with her, he couldn't be completely honest with anyone. "I feel guilty, being so worried about how they're doing when really, we had it easy compared to what the kids here were going through."

Hermione shook her head. "Last year was traumatic for everyone," she said at once. "No, your Etonites weren't here, being tortured and cursed, but that's because if they had been here, they'd have been killed. They had to go into hiding, not knowing how long it would last, not knowing if their families were safe, not being able to talk to anyone outside your estate. Those things are traumatic, too. My biggest worry, honestly, is that a lot of people will think the way you just did, but negatively. I worry that the them vs us mentality will get almost impossible to overcome."

"Actually," Justin said, reaching under the table for his bag and pulling out a left-handed spiral notebook, "I have a plan for that."

Hermione smiled at the notebook, amused. "Gone full Muggle, I see?"

Justin laughed. "I was lamenting to Mum that I was going to have to go back to parchment, and she looked at me like I had grown another head and asked 'Why?' And I realized I didn't have any answer besides 'That's how wizards do things,' and honestly? That no longer seems like a good enough answer. Which actually leads into my project. You'll find this out when you go in for your individualized assessment, but for us few repeat 7th years, they're basically just asking if we're keeping to the same N.E.W.T. track we were on."

"Which I can't imagine isn't a yes for everyone."

"I'm actually completely shifting course," he told her. Her eyebrows raised in surprise.

"Really? Why?"

Justin shrugged. "I was taking a handful of basics, planning on an entry-level position in the Ministry and then finding the right path from there. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but I do now. I want to be a Muggle Liaison."

Hermione sat back. "Well, of course you do," she said, as if that should have been obvious. He smiled and nodded.

"Yeah, but I wasn't taking N.E.W.T. level Muggle Studies, so now I am. I'm not too worried about passing the exam, though. I just went over a practice exam with Professor Douglas, and I'm pretty sure your average Muggle-raised third year would actually pass with flying colors. I need to brush up on some basic science, because they ask a lot of questions about airplanes and batteries, but other than that, it's mostly in the bag. So my main focus for the class, we worked out today, is going to be the Unified Student Organization."

Hermione crossed her arms and smiled. "And what is the Unified Student Organization?"

"A student group that's going to have a snappier name as soon as I come up with one. My goal is to slowly eliminate any trace of Us vs Them in this school, by homogenizing wizard-raised with Muggle-raised as young as possible. We'll meet twice a month. One meeting will be focused on wizarding life and what's obvious to wizards, and the other will do the same thing for Muggle life. There will be no such thing as a stupid question, and we will all learn from each other and grow and-"

He broke off, realizing he was getting impassioned. But Hermione was smiling wider than ever. "That sounds amazing," she said. "I want to help."

"I was hoping you would," he admitted. "I want to make sure that no incoming first year ever feels as out of place and untethered as we did. Because tracking down Death Eaters is all well and good, and necessary. But this is how we make sure it doesn't happen again. We unify everyone."

"I couldn't have put it better myself," she said.

Just then, they heard a frustrated cry. They both turned toward the sound to see a young Slytherin girl near tears as she righted an inkwell and stared down at a sodden mass of parchment. Justin looked back to Hermione, eyes twinkling. She held up her wand.

"I've got a siphoning charm," she said.

"And I've got her new best friend," he told her, and at her quizzical look, he reached into a pocket and pulled out a ballpoint pen. She threw her head back and laughed.

"I should have known," she said. "This has been your real gambit all along, hasn't it?"

"Yes," he deadpanned. "Make sure every Muggle-raised student feels they have a place here, and make sure every magic-raised student comes to the realization that quills are garbage. Those are my two goals."

"Well," she said, standing. "Let's go make at least one of those happen, shall we?"

Grinning, he rose from the table and went with her to the aid of the struggling student.

It was going to be a good year.

That's a wrap, folks. Thanks for reading.