Chapter Text
The truth about war that no one told her when she first started running around with Harry was that even in its quietest moments, it was exhausting. Every moment of it was tiring. She woke up every morning on high alert. She ate, knowing she might have to give up her ration of grains. She slept in fear of waking up.
The knowledge probably wouldn’t have made a difference to her. Her fate was sealed ten years ago when she threw her lot in with the two boys who saved her from a troll. She had lied to an authority figure, and from that moment on, Hermione Granger would jump without looking as long as Harry and Ron were ahead or behind her.
It was a shame neither of them was around to jump first anymore.
As she picked through the underbrush, she mentally tallied up what she would need to scourge for the next day. There were eleven children in the cave she was hiking towards, and she would need to find enough food and supplies for them to last the week. Given Ginny’s half-mad, half-brilliant plan for their upcoming mission, Hermione figured it might be best to leave them with extras in case she didn’t make it back.
In the months since Harry died, everyone was feeling reckless. Britain had become a veritable battle zone. Voldemort was unable to create a power base on the continent but was doing enough damage that the muggles noticed. And when the muggles saw a threat they couldn’t fight directly, they got angry.
The result was a full-blown war: mundane versus magical, wizards against wizards.
Witches and wizards who weren’t interested in fighting for their lives anymore, apparated or took the rare- and expensive- portkey out of Britain, only to be rounded up by muggle authorities with magic restraining devices. The wizards who helped the muggle authorities develop magical restraints might be the only ones more hated than Voldemort at the moment.
The Salem witch trials had nothing on the new world order.
For all magic could do, in the end, it was a numbers game. For every thousand wizards, there were ten million muggles. When threatened, the muggles were quick to pull out their machine guns and hydrogen bombs and nuclear weapons. A quick protego couldn't stop the onslaught of fifty bullets per second.
Hermione was no fool. Given a few more months of warfare, the muggle government was likely to evacuate Britain and bomb it clean of magic.
The arithmancy was not easily fooled either. Every version of every equation she ran had the same result. Voldemort and his cronies were slowly eradicating magic from the world. Magic was dying, and once magic disappeared, humanity would follow.
Purebloods had conveniently forgotten that magic was not bound to only them and their families. Each person, even muggles, had some magic. For the muggles whom purebloods derisively sneered at, this magic was muted. It was coiled tighter in their cores and expressed in different ways than wand-waving or potion-making.
Some people were charismatic beyond words, and some could always make the perfect coffee. There were muggles with “healing hands” or eidetic memories. Some had “green thumbs” and others would never forget a face. Sure they were unable to cast a simple lumos, but why bother when they could switch on a lightbulb and shore up their magical reserves for greater feats. Regardless of the type of magic, without balance, it would eat away at a core.
For every wizard's life taken, some corresponding number of muggles' lives were lost as well. For each muggle killed by magic, a handful of Wizarding lives were lost. Eventually, this war would eradicate all life.
Hermione wasn’t sure if she cared enough to prevent the extinction of magic and the human race anymore. It had been years since Harry, Ron, and the Forest Of Dean, and there was no end in sight.
Ron teaching her to skip rocks, so reminiscent of her swotty ’Swish and flick Ronald. Swish and flick.” felt like a moment from a life long past.
She shook those maudlin thoughts away. Her chest hurt.
Ginny’s latest mad plan involved breaking into Hogwarts to steal from the potion stores leftover. Ginny was convinced they could get in through the secret underground tunnels and get out safely. She conveniently neglected to plan for the dementors that eagerly prowled the grounds of Hogwarts for their next meal.
Could any of them even cast a patronus anymore?
Hermione didn’t care if she made it out safe. She was tired.
She lopped around a circle of trees to the front of her security runes. After muttering a distinction spell, the runes opened up into a series of twelve. Each rune was targeted to someone who inhabited the cave permanently- one for each child in the cave and one for her. This way, even if someone inside the cave gave up the location of the cave, unless all the other occupants agreed of their own free will that the newcomer wished them no harm, they would be denied entry (and subjected to various curses and hexes that Ginny had made up at her most unforgiving).
She worked through each rune quickly, stopping for a moment when a particularly cruel rune bit into her pinky.
Loretta, a Muggleborn who’s parents were bitten by Greyback, had an uncanny talent for grey hexes, and she always made her runes mean. Once Hermione disentangled the runes, she stepped forward delicately avoiding the many magical and mundane traps set for intruders before knocking on an inner wall on the left side of the cave.
Once, twice, thrice.
From the darkness of the cave, there was a bright flash of lumos that had her wincing.
Suddenly there was a wand at her throat.
If anyone else had seen the sight, they might’ve laughed, but Hermione had raised and trained most of these kids for three years now. She knew how dangerous they could be. Four children, all under the age of eleven, were arranged in a loose semi-circle around her. Only one had a wand, and the rest had their fists up, almost in a fighting stance. A single punch would not do much damage to Hermione, but a wandless stupefy from any of them would keep her knocked out enough for Loretta to use Bellatrix’s cursed wand to perform a quick obliviate. The intruder would find themselves suddenly unable to survive without eating fresh curry daily in the bazaar streets of Delhi. This was the best-case scenario for the intruder, as the war had not yet reached the Eastern parts of Asia or South Africa, where magic and folk tales were so inextricably linked that they weren’t as quickly erased as in Britain.
“Hi, Hermione!” Connor waved excitedly. Hermione smiled back at him but didn’t speak.
Loretta sent him a sharp look, and he stepped back. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the security protocols, it had just been so long since they last saw Hermione, and he had been hungry and excited, and the protocols were just so dumb right now!
“What did you call Slughorn when he said he couldn’t get any more potion supplies to you from Hogwarts?”
Hermione smiled. That was an interesting discussion. “A two-faced self-serving bootlicker if I remember correctly.”
Loretta laughed and something inside the younger girl released. She looked more her age than she had seconds ago. She nodded to Connor, and the two girls behind him, Jamie and Sammy, the half-blood twins from Kensington, and the whole group relaxed. The twins grabbed a few of her bags out of her arms and scurried back to the rest of the living quarters. Connor grabbed one of her hands and started talking about his improvements to his wandless sweeping charm.
Loretta shared a bittersweet smile with Hermione. Her hair was scraggly, and the bags under her eyes were much darker than they had been a week ago. Hermione wondered when the last time the girl had slept was. Though ten years older than Loretta, Hermione knew that they were both too young for this war.
Men started wars; women and children died in them.
As they sat around the bluebell fire, Connor and some of the other children were telling her stories while she mmm’d and ohh’d in all the right places. She’d been scraping through her serving of oatmeal for an hour now. Her stomach turned with unease, but she knew better than to waste food.
Everything was quiet and she just started to feel her shoulders relax when the warning bell that someone or something was too close to their wards went off. Her head snapped up and she met Loretta’s eyes. None of the other children were worried. Squirrels and raccoons ran out by their wards often.
A minute later, the second warning bell went off. There was now an appropriate level of panic. Hermione waved her hand up, disrupting the magical energy in the air and making it pulse over the children like a soft wave. Harmless but effective. Every child quickly disillusioned themselves and hid as far back in the rock shelves of the cave as they could. They ran drills for these alerts daily. Loretta looked like she was going to argue with Hermione, but at the look on Hermione’s face, she sullenly tucked herself into the rocks as well.
A small boy stepped into the cave. His steps were light but made a surprising amount of noise. He didn’t seem to be looking for anyone else besides Hermione; his eyes lit on only hers. If he was here to harm her, he wasn’t making any quick moves to do so. Hermione stepped forward, trying to keep his attention on her and away from the children. Sure he could be just another child orphaned by the war, but while the wards only let innocents in, they’d been tricked before.
There was something odd about the child. He was about six or seven years old, thinner than he should be, although with the state of things that wasn’t unexpected. Aside from the fact that he had somehow managed to find an exceptionally warded cave sixty kilometers from the nearest still inhabited town, there was nothing special about him.
Hermione knew that short of Voldemort himself, the only other people who could break through these wards with ill intentions were dead. She’d killed them herself.
No one over the age of 11 could get past the magically triggered land mines placed a meter in front of the wards, and the thick mist she had passed through moments earlier was spelled to remove all enchantments. Her glamour had faded, leaving her recognizable to anyone who would do her harm- these days, that was everyone except the tattered remnants of the Order.
The kid stepped closer to her, something about him clicking deep in her mind. Wary, she still hadn’t signaled for the other children to step out from their hiding place. Hermione knew that it was well known to Voldemort and his followers that the newly titled Undesirable No. 1’s weakness was children. After all, trusting an innocent-looking child was how Harry’s luck had finally run out.
“What’s your name, honey?” she asked as non-threateningly as possible, her wand still in her holster, but her hand lifted in front of her as if to reach out to the kid and hold his hand. Ulteriorly, her wandless magic had become infinitely more potent during the past three years of all-out war, and she was more than capable of casting a strong enough protego and stupefy if this child turned out dangerous. She wasn’t willing to put the eleven lives hiding behind her at risk for something as easily trampled as her morals anymore.
She stood stock-still for a moment and then another and then another.
He finally reached out and took her hand. For a moment, she felt a sense of peace wash over her before she snapped out of the artificial haze and her mind warned her of danger. Her body was frozen in place and this seemingly innocent child was the reason. She wasn’t sure how. He didn’t have a wand out, nor was he making any apparent movements. He just stood there, still and quiet, holding her hand.
She tried to speak, but all that came out was garbled nothings.
“I know, I know,” the boy murmured, his voice sounded too old for his small body. “It’ll make sense one day.”
Hermione calmed her entire body, forcing herself to be still. When the boy moved closer to her, she tried to spring her muscles free and scream. She managed a pitiful whine and the twitch of one arm.
The boy tsked as if she was extremely unreasonable. ’He should release my body-bind so I can apologize for being impolite, ’ Hermione thought.
“Dumbledore was a silly man, you know?” The boy began conversationally, while Hermione did her best to glare at him even though her facial muscles would not allow it. “He liked to say that terrible things happened to wizards who meddled in time. Dumbledore meddled in time constantly. His actions often ended poorly, but perhaps he was more at fault for that than Lady Time.”
Hermione was careful not to react. The Hermione of five years ago would have been outraged to think Professor Albus Dumbledore in all of his Order of Merlin, and many uses of dragon’s blood, glory did not know all the answers. But enough time, and enough watching Harry suffer for the Greater Good, all capitals implied for the full title, had shown her that great men had their faults- some more than others.
She would never forgive him for the abuse Harry had lived through.
As if her silence was tacit permission to prattle on, he kept talking. Hermione vowed to create a spell to disable someone’s vocal cords permanently.
“See many were against giving you all a second chance. After all, you’d managed to muck up humanity so spectacularly.” The boy had let go of her hand and was casually strolling across the small length of the cave. He smiled and waved to where the children were hiding as if he could see them through a solid rock wall. He seemed utterly unconcerned with the way her hair was sparking in anger.
“But honestly, you humans are so pitiful,” the child laughed. Hermione gritted her teeth together.
“I’ve decided on a second chance for you,” he continued. “Some of the others said we should pick someone else as our Champion.”
Hermione gritted her teeth together even harder. Pick someone else as your champion, she begged.
“But out of the poor choices we had, you were the most amusing. Always so eager, so determined to do good. If nothing else, you’ll make for the best entertainment.” The small demon troll laughed, clapping his hands together. “So be it!”
Hermione wished she could scream at the boy. She wanted to kick and slap and scratch at him. His hands were moving in almost familiar rune creating motions. He formed aiteall, quickly followed by some red mist that dispersed through the cave. Then he moved his arms up in sharp spikes to establish kaal and zaman separately.
If she was less irritated, she would’ve found his rune work fascinating. He was forming them in the air, and they were sparking and functional? Amazing! But at the moment, irritating.
He continued to circle her and work quickly, while she continued to strain her neck, trying to move through the body bind to see what he was doing. Finally, he skipped back to where he started, took two giant steps forward until he was nose to nose with her and smiled.
Hermione grimaced and continued to scream internally. She didn’t need anyone that close to her face.
“This will be fun!” the little demon laughed as he pulled a glass orb from his front pocket. Undetectable extension charm? He said a few quick words over the sphere that Hermione couldn’t hear, before hefting the orb between both his hands and slamming it straight into her face.
She didn’t react for a moment- the trauma seemed to take time to kick in- but when it did, her outrage managed to outpace her excruciating pain.
She screamed and trashed against the body bind and silencing charm. When an unnatural wind picked up inside the cave, she kept screaming. When the fire she’d been sitting by moved as if water, to circle her, she kept screaming. Soon the water from the children’s canteens and the dirt from the bottom of the cave was circling her as well. They spun quicker and quicker while she tried to scream louder and louder. She was sure no one could hear her, but it felt better than doing nothing.
What seemed like an eternity of pain later, the stupid small child- she should’ve hexed him immediately- smiled at her. “Cheer up, darling. You get to do it all over again!”
With those parting words, a bright light shot at her chest, and she felt her skin tear apart, inch by inch. The glass pieces from the orb seemed to burn to a thousand degrees and melt into her bones. She was still screaming, but now she was sure the children in the cave could hear her. Most of Britain could probably hear her.
In her final moments, all she was able to think was ‘don’t you fucking dare,’ and then all her thoughts were blissfully black.