Hermione was surprised to find, upon knocking on Professor Watson's office door on the third floor of the main castle, that he already had visitors.
And not just any visitors but the very people whose families had caused her recent disagreement with Ron at the dinner table.
Professor Watson sat behind his desk, fingers laced together against his abdomen, looking calmly at the students across from him: Malfoy, Parkinson, Nott, and both Greengrass sisters, they were primarily Slytherins who, as Hermione understood it, took his Physical Education class together.
"Ah, you arrived quite quickly, Miss Granger—"
He glanced briefly at her flushed cheeks and her still-slightly-strenuous breathing as evidence of the hurried walk up from the Great Hall and raised one hand in a small, polite gesture.
"Please wait a moment, if you would."
Hermione nodded without a sound and made her way quietly to the sofa set against the far wall, settling herself in to wait without intruding on whatever conversation she'd apparently interrupted.
Passing the display cabinet on her way—that particular showcase which had, over the past year, earned itself a modest and somewhat infamous reputation among the student body, she couldn't help but steal a curious glance at its contents.
The collection had grown considerably since she'd last had occasion to study it closely. That wasn't especially surprising, she thought; with a new school year freshly underway came the inevitable parade of students hoping to sneak some piece of contraband or another past the general chaos of arrival, only to have it confiscated and added to Bryan's steadily expanding collection.
But among all the peculiar and varied exhibits crowded into the cabinet, the single most striking object remained, as it always had been, that wand/staff belonging to Cliodna.
Hermione cast it a brief, wondering look as she passed, then settled herself primly onto the sofa cushions.
Malfoy and the others gave her a cool, passing glance as she sat down before losing interest.
A heavy silence settled back over the room.
Even the autumn breeze drifting in through the partially open windows carrying with it the distant sound of waves breaking somewhere beyond the forest couldn't dispel the strange oppressiveness that hung in the office air.
On the desk in front of Bryan lay a loose scattering of documents; some clearly administrative in nature, others bearing the official stamps of routine dispatches from the Ministry of Magic.
Bryan idly flipped through the stack as the silence stretched, found nothing within it of any particular urgency or importance, gathered the pages into a single neat stack with a few efficient taps against the desk's surface, and set the whole pile aside.
Thwack!
The sharp, sudden crack of paper meeting wood made the students seated across from him flinch, almost in perfect unison.
"Tell me what you're thinking."
Bryan looked at them steadily, each face in turn, his voice was impeccably level.
"About what, sir?"
After a brief hesitation, it was Draco who finally found the nerve to ask.
Hermione sat very still on her sofa, eyes focused straight ahead.
'So the conversation is only just beginning,' she thought.
"Strictly speaking, providing psychological counselling isn't my role—perhaps Severus would be better suited for that. But since the resentment several of you are carrying involves me, and involves decisions I made, I can hardly simply ignore your feelings on the matter and hope they resolve themselves.
Left to fester unaddressed, feelings like that have a tendency to curdle into something considerably darker. Something that ends up harming you. And, potentially, harming others who've done nothing to deserve becoming part of it."
Bryan let his gaze settle on Draco as he said this. The colour drained visibly from the boy's face under that steady attention.
No one in the room spoke.
Hermione, her ears practically pricked forward with the effort of following every word, didn't find the silence strange in the least.
Had she found herself in their position with her own father sitting in a Ministry cell somewhere, her family's fortune dismantled in a single afternoon by the very man now asking her to share her feelings about it—she suspected she would have had nothing to say either.
"So. You won't open up to me of your own accord."
Bryan shook his head slowly, a trace of disappointment appeared on his face.
"Then let me speak first, and perhaps that will make it easier. Nott—and both Miss Greengrasses, if you would."
Theodore Nott, and Daphne and Astoria Greengrass beside him, sat up straighter at the sound of their own names being called, the reaction was almost entirely reflexive.
Bryan looked at the three of them in turn—two fifth-years currently facing the considerable pressure of their O.W.L. year ahead, and a third-year who had, by his estimation, barely found her proper footing within the school at all and his eyes deepened.
"Do you hate me?"
Hermione's heart lurched sharply in her chest. She watched Professor Watson from the very corner of her eye, not daring to turn her head fully and draw attention to her presence in the room.
She could roughly guess what this entire conversation was building toward but she hadn't expected him to be quite so direct about it. So entirely unflinching in simply asking the question without softening or circling it first.
The three named students were visibly startled by the bluntness of it. Each of them worked, with varying degrees of success, to keep their own faces still, to reveal nothing in response.
But a question demanded some kind of answer in return.
As the only boy among the three, and perhaps feeling some unspoken obligation that came with that distinction, Theodore felt he ought to be the one to hold himself together and respond first.
"No, Professor Watson," he said in a flat tone.
"Hmm." Bryan studied him for a moment. "We both know that's a lie, Theodore."
Theodore said nothing in response to that.
"Your father was found on the battlefield at the Battle of Diagon Alley—"
The words were delivered softly gently, even but they sent a visible jolt through the room regardless, and through Hermione watching from her sofa.
She saw Theodore's fist clench suddenly at his side, the veins along his forehead stood out sharply beneath the skin that had gone pale, his entire face was contorting into something that looked frightening.
"Perhaps this will surprise you to hear, but I'll say it plainly: I do not look down on Death Eaters as a category of person. I do, however, believe firmly that they must face real consequences for what they've actually done—"
Bryan's fingers laced together again in front of him as he watched Theodore without any particular expression.
"I suspect no rational, clear-minded witch or wizard anywhere would seriously argue otherwise, whatever sympathies they might privately hold. That said—"
The raw pain visible in Theodore's eyes seemed, somehow, to soften something in Bryan's own expression,.
"—I would never judge a child by the crimes of their parents or elders. Not I, and not any other professor currently serving at Hogwarts. That is among the most basic and non-negotiable obligations a teacher carries."
Hermione silently applauded him and the sentiment.
The Slytherin students arranged around the office had gone quiet throughout this—none of them seemed able to find words of their own, and several simply sat staring intently at the floor between their feet, unwilling to meet anyone's eyes, including each other's.
Even so, Bryan's words had taken some of the sharpest edge off Theodore's anguish. The raw pain in his eyes hadn't vanished but his clenched fist had loosened just slightly against his side.
"Professor—"
Theodore's voice came out rough, scraped thin, when he finally spoke again. The other students turned to look at him in evident surprise, apparently none of them had expected him to be the one to push the conversation further.
"I heard my father has been sent to Avalon Prison."
Theodore's jaw was tight as he said it, his breathing was growing visibly uneven.
"That place… that place—"
"It's nothing like Azkaban."
Bryan said cutting cleanly through whatever fearful assumption Theodore had been working up toward.
"There are no Dementors stationed there to torment the inmates."
"But I heard there are Acromantulas there."
Theodore looked up at Professor Watson — at that deeply imposing face that remained utterly still throughout the exchange and genuine fear flickered, openly now in the boy's eyes.
"They—"
"The Acromantulas stationed at Avalon are there to maintain order. To prevent escapes, and to prevent unauthorised entry from outside. They are not there, in any capacity, to inflict suffering on the prisoners in their charge."
Bryan continued.
"Avalon Prison is fundamentally different from Azkaban in its entire design and philosophy. Prisoners there are not punished through terror, or torment. The actual intent behind Avalon is for inmates to genuinely reflect on what they've done, and to take real, active responsibility for it, rather than simply having something done to them in return."
"Genuinely reflect?" Theodore repeated the phrase, visibly bewildered by the concept as applied to a prison.
"That's right."
Bryan nodded.
"Inmates receive instruction in proper values as part of their sentence. And they work."
"Work?" Hermione blurted the word out before she could stop herself, the surprise was overriding her earlier resolve to remain silent and unnoticed on the sofa.
"Correct, Miss Granger."
He didn't reproach her for the interruption, just simply nodded in her direction.
"Much like the villagers who marched through Diagon Alley the other day, prisoners at Avalon are required to perform physical work as part of their daily routine. Farming. Tending Mooncalves and other magical livestock. That general sort of labour."
The head of the illustrious, ancient Nott family—farming, and raising livestock after his arrest?
The words, delivered with Bryan's complete composure, nearly made Hermione burst out laughing despite the gravity of everything else in the room.
She had to pinch the skin of her own thigh hard, beneath the fold of her robes, to keep from shattering the careful, delicate atmosphere Professor Watson had spent the last several minutes constructing.
What Hermione found darkly amusing, the others in the room plainly did not.
For Draco and the rest, the image was something closer to a deep and intensely private humiliation—the thought of their own fathers, men who had spent entire lifetimes surrounded by house-elves and inherited comfort, potentially spending their remaining years tilling fields and mucking out Mooncalf pens like common labourers.
Though, when any of them actually thought it through with a clearer head, setting the hurt pride aside for a moment…
It was, by any reasonable measure, incomparably better than Azkaban. Better by every metric that actually mattered.
Still, Theodore's face remained ashen, the colour was not returning despite Bryan's reassurances.
His father wouldn't be slowly broken apart by Dementors feeding on his despair—that much, at least, had genuinely loosened some of the resentment wound tightly inside Theodore's chest.
But the image of his own father, a man who had known nothing but comfort and privilege across the entirety of his life spending the rest of his days under guard, performing the daily labour of common farmhands, struck Theodore, in this moment, as something that might very well be worse than death itself.
"My father…"
His face cycled rapidly through several shades of grey and red before he managed to force the rest of the sentence out.
"I heard he received a life sentence. Does he still have any chance to—"
"If he conducts himself well during his time there, I believe there is every reasonable chance he'll see the outside world again before the end of his life."
Bryan said it plainly, without false comfort and unnecessary cruelty either.
He tapped the surface of his desk once with two fingers, and a drawer set into a nearby bookshelf flew open of its own accord; a single document sailed out from within it not landing on the desk in front of Bryan, but drifting directly across the room into Theodore's waiting, slightly trembling hands.
Theodore took it, dazed by the sudden movement. When his eyes fell on the text printed across its cover, his expression sharpened at once.
"Avalon Prison Regulations—this document outlines the specific behavioural criteria I've personally drafted for reducing or extending individual sentences, based on each inmate's ongoing conduct and compliance with the facility's expectations."
Draco and the others immediately leaned forward, their eyes were focusing on the document with sudden, intense interest. Before Theodore had managed to read past the first page, Draco's hand had already reached over and plucked it neatly out of his grip.
'You never knew, after all, when something like this might come in useful,' Draco thought, scanning the lines rapidly.
"Can I send a copy to my father, Professor Watson?"
Theodore looked at Bryan urgently—the document was already in Draco's hands.
"No need."
Bryan shook his head.
"Every inmate is taught these exact rules upon entry to the facility, as a standard part of intake. They all already know what's expected of them and what the path toward release looks like. Whether any individual inmate actually chooses to follow that path is, naturally, an entirely different matter, and not something I can control on their behalf.
If you genuinely want to see your father released sooner rather than later, Theodore—when you have the opportunity to see him, you can encourage him directly to commit himself properly to his own rehabilitation."
"I—I can still see him? I'm actually—"
Theodore's mouth fell open in shock.
The other young witches and wizards scattered around the office, Hermione very much included from her seat on the sofa, all turned to look at Professor Watson with matching astonishment.
"Of course."
Bryan gave a calm nod.
"In fact, to help teach students more broadly about the importance of lawfulness, of cherishing life properly, and of avoiding the particular path that leads someone toward crime in the first place, Hogwarts will be organising a special educational visit later this term.
All fifth-years and above will be permitted to apply for a place on a tour of the newly established Avalon Prison facility."
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