Head canon and fugue: Harry; Hermione (crossposted from the appropriate comm)

[wemyss]

Head canon (and fugue): Harry

1. He’s really quite pleased that, since the post-War reforms, the Aurors are effectively the Army and MLE do the policing.
2. He never wished to be a glorified policeman, after all, and the disciplined application of force is his metier, rather than detection and that swotty sort of thing.
3. He remains, at bottom, really quite conventional.
4. Andromeda however took him in hand and saw to it that he was polished properly as a Potter of the old line, not a lower-middle-Muggle, semi-detached in Staines.
5. One thing he took from that was a deep and abiding affection for his ancestral West Country, where he has restored the old Potter holdings. And he likes cider and Bath chap and farmhouse Cheddar as much as if he’d been bred up in his ancestors’ Somerset.
6. Andromeda had a hand in the making of him; so also did Kingsley, after the War. The hardest thing he had ever to do was to learn discipline.
7. He did. Nowadays, Harry incarnates the military virtues, and is the complete British officer (Wizarding Mark VI) at all points.
8. What with Andromeda’s tuition, the Royal Corps of Aurors, and RMMA Norsworthy (in Devon: the Wizarding Sandhurst), Harry has become a Potter to his fingertips, entered upon the heritage once denied him, an officer and a gentleman … whose longsuffering children can repeat the line with him, ‘We are a Service family’, all too regularly (usually advanced in contrasting the Potters as against Certain Malfoys as being Aristocrats Behaving Badly).
9. Harry has however become fond of Cousin Cissy: mostly ‘Aunt’ Andromeda’s doing, that. And as a result, rubs along well enough with Draco and is quite fond of Al’s, ah, special friend, Scorpius.
10. With the post-War division between Aurors as the military and MLE as PC Plod, the Aurors are rarely called upon to give aid to the civil power. This is partly because Harry tends to give more aid to the civil power than the civil power can well bear.
11. Had Harry, like Albus Dumbledore, become a headmaster after the War rather than an Auror, he might well have remained a rather Wet, LibDemish sort of person. Years at the sharp end have made him a Tory red in tooth and claw, the Peppery Old Brigadier sort of chap. Ron has learnt to slope off and spend time with the various sprogs when this leads to lengthy, if fond, arguments at table between Harry and Hermione.
12. James, Albus, and Lily love their father … in rather an exasperated fashion.
13. Teddy, mind, thinks his godfather is simply brill.
14. Dudley also rather hero-worships Harry, which everyone is too polite to remark (save Harry, who really doesn’t notice).
15. Andromeda may have done her work rather too well: Harry now realises what it is to be a Potter (Andromeda does wish, really, she’d remembered that when Sirius did a bunk and turned up at the Potters’ place, not even the Blacks dared say anything to That Family).
16. Harry is incorruptible. He is also pigheaded, wholly military, and commonly quite certain he’s right. Also, he considers that everyone else is obliged to be as self-sacrificing as he. This is why the Ministry - even, perhaps especially, when the government of the day is composed of his friends - regard him, with wary affection and respect, as the Most Dangerous Wizard in Britain. He’s the one man who, in a crisis, could become a dictator without meaning to do.
17. His father-in-law and his sister-in-law Hermione will never allow that to happen.
18. For his sake.
19. He still cannot reliably and readily brew a potion to save his life.
20. That is the one remaining gap in his education. Like the young Churchill after Sandhurst, Harry as a young subaltern of Aurors educated himself, diligently.
21. He’s not particularly religious (he is after all British), but he wears the military conventions like a bespoke tweed shooting-suit. That means the Established Church, Church Parade on Sundays, and - now that he’s found rather unexpectedly a moderate talent - the bass section in the parish choir (although he’s really a baritone, not a basso: like most church choir basses).
22. He’s not admitted it, even to himself, but he has unexpected æsthetic sensibilities: English choral music, landscape, architecture, even a carefully limited choice in English poets (Wordsworth’s utterly Wet; but Betjeman and Larkin, Browning, Herbert, and Donne, are Quite Sound).
23. He doesn’t hunt a great deal, or shoot, but he is rather fond of angling. He was disconcerted to find himself amicably arguing fly patterns with Malfoy.
24. There’s a vein of savage wit in him that surprises those who forget that he cheeked Snape when he was a schoolboy, and with some pith. At his club - dining at which being one of the only reasons why he ever goes up to London (the others being public duty, his barber, and his tailor) - he’s cherished as a Character.
25. Although it’s his wife’s family of whom the Wellesleys are the Squib branch, it’s Harry who is the very modern magical model of the duke of Wellington - including the licensed eccentricities and peppery temper.
26. Harry’s way of learning is different to Hermione’s - or Ron’s. The Hat was not however blagging him when it said he could fit in as a Ravenclaw as much as in any of the Houses. When, after the Restoration and the end of the Secrecy Regime, the University of Domdaniel re-emerged to share the Hogwarts fabric, he eventually went up, on a few years’ leave, and took his MMA.
27. In history.
28. Magical Military History.
29. Teddy thinks that’s brill, also. Harry and Andromeda just smile, and think of Remus.
30. Harry looks like James, certainly, but Sirius was his cousin as well as his godfather, and Harry’s bark of laughter is wholly Sirius’.
31. When, many years after the War, there was a panto in aid of charity and Malfoy was dragooned into appearing as the Dame, Harry sniggered for a month.
32. Harry and Ginny went through their share of rough patches, not least because she had a Romantic Image of him that was nothing like him, and he tended rather to patronise her without meaning to, but they got past that and were a marriage of true - and equal - minds.
33. He misses her terribly, and on certain days, slips off to put flowers on her grave. The people Harry has loved best over the years tend not to die peaceably abed. He’s not forgiven himself for not saving her that last time, in what were thought to be the years of peace; he quite likely never shall.

Head canon (and fugue): Hermione

1. Hermione’s mother’s fondest memories are of Greenham Common.
2. Mr and Mrs Granger are vocal believers in the NHS, and feel terribly guilty that they are quite comfortably well off precisely because Mr Granger has a thriving private practice, whilst Mrs G is the NHS dentist.
3. The surest way to cause Hermione to throw a Most Impressive Temperament is to remark on what she has in common, in terms of history and character and the Outsider’s Ascent, with Margaret Thatcher, whom she dutifully loathes as Mummy taught her to do.
4. Hermione’s culinary skills bear comparison to Rubeus Hagrid’s. Hagrid may be slightly less dire a cook. Ron loves her despite this sore trial to his infamous appetite.
5. She’s no oil painting (in her own estimation, at any rate), but she does satisfy Ron’s other appetites beyond either of their wildest adolescent dreams. She’s not altogether prim and proper, in private, you realise.
6. It has required both potions and Durex to have kept their number of children at two.
7. When Rose and Hugo want to be talked out of something - or, perhaps more surprisingly to outsiders, when they want ‘validation’ - they go to Hermione. (When they want understanding and a practical way out of whatever they’ve cocked up, they go to Ron.)
8. Hermione tries very conscientiously not to smother her children.
9. Some hope.
10. Hermione loves her husband very much, and is fond, really, of his family. She must do and be to stick spending time in the countryside: she loathes it, and grudges every moment away from London.
11. Hermione loves art and music so much she will even stop theorising about them long enough to enjoy them.
12. Indeed, she cares so much for music she’ll even go to church for it, if there’s absolutely no other way to hear it.
13. Had Harry, like Albus Dumbledore, become a headmaster after the War rather than an Auror, he might well have remained a rather Wet, LibDemish sort of person. Years at the sharp end have made him a Tory red in tooth and claw, the Peppery Old Brigadier sort of chap. Ron has learnt to slope off and spend time with the various sprogs when this leads to lengthy, if fond, arguments at table between Harry and Hermione.
14. Hermione says she feels obliged to stay abreast of Muggle events, but Ron wisely refrains from remarking that she doesn’t take in The Telegraph, only The Guardian, The Observer, and The Independent. And of course The Big Issue.
15. Harry loves her dearly, but thinks her impractically idealistic - and says so. Ron rather agrees, but doesn’t say so. There are many reasons for the success of his and Hermione’s marriage; this is a fundamental one.
16. Had Hermione not learnt at last to laugh at herself, she’d have gone mad yonks ago.
17. It’s a difficult thing, being Everyone’s Conscience, but Hermione is the slave of duty. And it’s pleasant to consider that it’s even more difficult for Everyone….
18. Hermione is a Principled Feminist. She redoubles her efforts every time she realises - but refuses to admit even to herself - that she really doesn’t like other women, on the whole. (She really doesn’t realise that Molly finds this quietly hilarious.)
19. So far as Hermione has friends of her own sex, they are Percy’s wife Audrey; Ginny; Hannah, rather unexpectedly; and still more unexpectedly, Luna.
20. Fleur, on the other hand, is Right Out.
21. Hermione has never learnt to pick her battles. This is a large part of why she and Harry understand one another so well, on a fundamental level.
22. Hermione and her mother have never really got on. She’s Daddy’s girl, through and through.
23. Her unacknowledged Mother Figure of choice is Minerva, instead.
24. Dearly as Mr Granger loves Hermione, neither he nor Mrs Granger has ever fully forgiven her for the Great Memory Modification Debacle. In his case, it’s less about trust than about Australia. Only Harry and Arthur fully understand his horror at realising that he spent a good deal of 1997 in Australia, supporting Australia (who were in England) in the Ashes.
25. Hermione’s family - Grangers, Puckles, and Buckets - were originally Sussex folk, but have been Londoners for generations, and middle-class professional bluestockings with it. It shows. She is named for a suffragette ancestress.
26. One attains certain skills in self-defence when one marries into the Weasleys. She once pranked George.
27. Hermione is torn between horror, principled support and advocacy, and private amusement at the relationship between Al and Scorpius.
28. They’re not precisely friends, but she and Asteria do commiserate over tea once a month.
29. James may be her godson, but Al is her not so secret favourite.
30. Well, joint first with Freddie.
31. She loyally supports Angelina, but finds the Quidditch obsession dreary. She will never realise that Angelina rather resents being treated as a lay figure on which, or whom, Hermione can display her pieties and broadmindedness.
32. Not even when Dean tells her quite plainly.
33. It was Hermione who discovered that her niece Lily was writing RPS about various Wizards of the War generation. She’s never said a word. And Ron has no idea that some of their more memorable evenings have been inspired by Hermione’s Very Secret Reading. Nor shall he.