Chapter Text
Chapter 1
Ministry
Hermione Weasley had always believed there were certain rules to magic.
Not Ministry rules. Those, she knew better than most, were bendable, breakable, badly worded things, drafted by committees and corrected only after enough people had suffered from their loopholes. She did not mean school rules either, though she had once spent a great deal of her life learning those, bending those, exploiting loopholes that she judged others for finding within the law now.
No.
She meant the deeper rules.
The old rules.
The sort that existed whether anyone wrote them down or not.
Magic had weight. Magic had consequence. Magic left traces.
She had learnt that lesson the hard way. It wasn't one that they had built in to the curriculum at Hogwarts, it was one that she had discovered on her own, through trial and error. In all honesty, it was one that she had learnt through endless, repetitive, hopeless error. But, eventually, she had learnt.
Magic was personal and threaded into your very bones. No two magical people wielded their magic in the same way. Even among families, magic didn't repeat, but it had a way of rhyming.
She saw the influence of Molly's steadfastness and kindness in how her children wielded magic. She saw Arthur's inquisitiveness and daring. And yet, no Weasley sibling wielded their magic the same.
Working in the department of Magical Law Enforcement, Hermione had also seen plenty of evidence of misuse of magic. Of corrupted magic, something dark and violent. Though, she had seen plenty of that well before her time in the Ministry too.
Whether people influenced their magic or their magic influenced them more, Hermione couldn't really say. Person and magic were so deeply entwined it was impossible to say where one ended at the other began.
To have it could be a gift.
It could also be a curse.
Either way though, it was yours.
It did not simply vanish.
And yet, the woman on the floor of Interrogation Room Three had no magic left at all.
Hermione stood very still in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, her wand loose between the fingers of her other hand. Around her, the Department of Magical Law Enforcement moved with the brittle urgency of people trying not to show they were frightened. Aurors passed in and out. A Healer knelt on the tiles. Someone had knocked over a chair.
Hermione could swear somewhere else someone was crying. Hermione hated it when people cried. It sent some nerve ticking in her jaw. Shout, swear, rage, by all means, but don't cry.
The woman on the floor did none of those things.
She only stared, blue eyes glassy and unfocused, at the ceiling. Open but unseeing.
Concious, but not present. Her breath rattled as her chest rose and fell. Her lips chapped, cheeks hollowed until her skin wrapped so tight around bone she may very well have been no more than a skeleton that didn't know it was dead yet.
Harry was crouched beside the Healer, his golden glasses slipping down his nose, his face an unnatural colour as the harsh Ministry emergency lights flashed about the room.
“Anything?” he asked.
The Healer shook her head.
Hermione stepped further inside.
The air felt wrong. Thin, somehow. Empty in a way no room ought to be empty when it contained so many people.
“Harry,” she said.
He looked up.
For one horrible second, he looked seventeen again.
Not the Harry who gave press statements and briefed the Wizengamot and walked into danger with a grim, adult calm. Not the Harry who had learned to wear exhaustion like part of his uniform.
Her Harry.
Her friend.
The boy who had once held on to the body of Cedric Diggory and understood, before any of them had been ready to, that childhood could end in a single moment.
Harry probably never really had one but, even through everything else they had been through, Hermione had managed to grip on to hers with desperate fingernails, right up until that moment. When Harry had come back with clever, handsome, charismatic Cedric as just a body.
They had felt invincible until that moment. They would triumph for no other reason than that they were good, and right. That made them untouchable.
Until they weren't.
Until Cedric was dead.
“She was found like this?” Hermione asked.
Harry stood slowly. “No.”
That one word sat heavily between them. The room silent save for the woman's rattling breaths, more laboured now. Slower.
Hermione’s fingers tightened around her wand.
“No?”
“She came in for questioning two hours ago,” Harry said. “Voluntarily. She was nervous, but coherent. Magical readings normal. Wand responsive. No sign of coercion.”
“And then?”
His jaw flexed, something in his green eyes steeled and he was Harry the auror again, not Harry the boy she had known.
“And then she screamed.”
Hermione looked at the woman. Looked closer, whilst the Healer continued to try, seemingly in vain, to help in someway.
She was perhaps forty. Maybe younger. It was difficult to tell, fear had a way of ageing a face, and whatever had happened to her had distored her appearance beyond any recognisable feature. Her robes were twisted around her knees. One shoe had come off. Her wand lay on the table above her, sealed in a Ministry charm.
Hermione moved towards it.
“Hermione,” Harry warned.
“I’m not going to touch it.”
She bent close instead, careful not to disturb anything. The wand was pale wood, ten inches perhaps, with a thin dark scorch mark running from handle to tip.
No.
Not scorch.
Scorching implied fire.
This looked as though something had been pulled through it from the inside.
A splintering outward.
A rupture.
Hermione swallowed. Harry glanced at her, his mouth pressed in to a thin hard line.
They stood in silence.
The woman on the floor made a thin, broken sound.
Both of them turned.
Her lips were moving.
Hermione dropped to her knees beside her at once.
“What is it?” she asked, voice softer. “Can you hear me?”
The woman’s eyes shifted, slowly, painfully, towards her.
Up close, Hermione could see the damage more clearly. The woman’s pupils were uneven. There were faint silver lines beneath the skin at her temples, like threads of light gone cold. Her fingers twitched, reaching for something that was no longer there.
Her wand, perhaps.
Or something else.
“She’s trying to speak,” Hermione said.
Harry knelt on the other side, beside the Healer.
The woman’s mouth opened.
No sound came at first, then, faintly, one word.
“Taken.”
Hermione leaned closer. “What was taken?”
The woman’s eyes filled with tears.
Not ordinary tears.
They shone faintly silver.
“Not… mine.”
Harry went still.
Hermione felt the hairs rise along her arms.
“What wasn’t yours?” she whispered.
The woman’s gaze fixed on Hermione with sudden, terrible clarity.
“Magic.”
Hermione felt it as the privacy charm around the room cracked. Not shattered or stopped. Cracked.
A line split across the frosted glass like lightning.
Harry swore violently and was on his feet in an instant. Hermione did not look away from the woman. “Who took it?” She asked gently.
The woman began to shake.
“Hermione,” Harry warned.
“Who took your magic?”
The woman’s hand shot out and clamped around Hermione’s wrist.
Pain flared.
Not physical. Not exactly.
Something colder.
Something that reached beneath skin and muscle and bone and brushed against the place where magic lived.
Hermione gasped.
Harry shouted her name.
For one instant, the room vanished.
She saw darkness.
No. Not darkness.
A hollow.
A space where something bright had been ripped away.
Then a whisper, so faint she might have imagined it. Speech but she couldn't quite hear the word.
Harry tore the woman’s hand from her wrist.
Hermione fell back hard, knocking into the table. The woman convulsed once, twice, then collapsed into terrible stillness.
The door burst open.
More aurors flooded in.
The Healer was still working desperately over the body.
Body.
Hermione knew before anyone said it.
She'd seen enough of them to know when that spark of life was gone.
Harry was at her side.
“You need to see a Healer”. He told her, his dark brows furrowing, making his scar more prominent. Even beneath the long way he wore his hair, he would never be free of that mark. Blessing and curse. Just like the magic that had cast it. Like the magic that had protected him.
“I'm fine” Hermione dismissed, turning so that her arm was not within his reach.
“She's gone”. The Healer said quietly, to no one in particular.
A hush and stillness came over them all for a long moment, then the room moved again. People asked questions. Reports began forming in the air. Someone sent for the Department of Mysteries. Someone else said Kingsley needed to be informed immediately
“I can take a look Mrs Weasley?” The Healer said, motioning towards Hermione's wrist, apparently satisfied there was nothing more she could do for the corpse on the floor. Her job was to help the living, the corpse was the aurors problem. “No.” Hermione said, a little too sharply, before adding in a softer “No, thank you”. The Healer sniffed and nodded once in Hermione and Harry's direction before leaving the room.
You can't help those that don't want helping. Hermione had learned that lesson the hard way too. She absently wondered if the Healer had learned it the hard way or if she had been instructed in it during her training at some point.
“Laurell, O'Keery. Sort this mess out. I'll be in my office, this is going to be a lot of paper work”. Harry sighed, scratching at the back of his messy head. The two aurors nodded diligently to him.
Harry motioned at Hermione to follow him and she wordlessly shadowed him to his office down the hall as a flurry of paper aeroplanes carrying news of what had occured in Interrogation Room Three zipped overhead. Neither of them spoke the whole way. Inside, Harry half collapsed in to his chair before reaching for a flask that Hermione knew, even before he opened it and the pungent smell of fire whisky drifted to her, didn't contain pumpkin juice.
He offered it in her direction but she shook her head, curls bouncing about her face as she did. They had all developed different ways to try and keep the nightmares out of the waking hours, that simply wasn't hers. Harry shrugged and took another deep swig.
“What was she being questioned about?” Hermione asked him eventually.
Harry’s forest eyes flicked to the door.
Hermione cast a privacy charm with a sharper motion than necessary.
Harry noticed. Of course he did. She hated that he always did.
“You need to go home after this,” he said.
She gave him a look.
“Hermione.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are very much not fine.”
“We can discuss my emotional health after you tell me why a witness has just been magically gutted inside a Ministry interrogation room right in front of you.”
His expression darkened.
That had been too much. She knew it as soon as she said it.
But the words were already there, ugly and blunt and horrible.
Harry looked away first.
Hermione closed her eyes briefly.
“I’m sorry.”
“No,” he said quietly. “You’re not wrong.”
That was worse.
Harry took off his glasses and rubbed a heavily scarred hand over his face. He looked exhausted. They all did lately. There were shadows beneath his eyes and two days’ worth of stubble at his jaw. Ginny would fuss at him for that. Or make fun of him. Or both.
“The case you’ve been working on,” Harry said. “The child trafficking ring. The illegal portkeys. The one from Dover.”
Hermione’s stomach tightened.
“What about it?”
“This woman was connected.”
Hermione went cold.
“That’s impossible.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It is. We shut that down. I sat through eighteen hours of testimony. I saw the holding cells. I saw the children.”
Her voice broke slightly on the last word, and she hated herself for it.
Harry was watching her carefully now.
Too carefully.
“We thought we shut it down,” he said.
Hermione looked back towards the door. somewhere through the winding corridors her colleagues were dealing with the cooling body.
In her mind, she saw the boy from Dover again.
Seven years old. Maybe eight.
There had been so many if them. The facts had all started to blurr in to one, who was eight, who was six. The faces never blurred though. They were always clear.
Curled under a table, one arm held protectively over his little sister, wandless sparks firing uncontrollably from his fingertips every time anyone tried to come near. He had bitten one of the Magical Response Team hard enough to draw blood. Hermione had been the only person who could get close.
She had sat on the cold floor for nearly an hour, wand set aside, palms open, voice steady.
She had promised him he was safe.
She had promised.
And now—
“What was her role?” Hermione asked.
Harry was silent long enough that she knew she was not going to like the answer.
“She was arranging buyers.”
The room shifted.
Or perhaps Hermione did.
For a second, she was aware of every sound at once, the hum of the lights, Harry’s breathing, the distant clatter of the lifts, the whisper of robes outside of the door.
Buyers.
Children.
Magic.
Her magic flickered before she could stop it. The privacy charm snapped tighter around the room, glass frosting over with a sudden white bloom.
Harry looked at the windows.
“Hermione.”
“I’m fine.”
“You keep saying that.”
“And you keep wasting time pointing it out.”
His eyes flashed.
“Because you nearly hexed Flint through a wall yesterday.”
“He deserved worse.”
“He was in custody.”
“He laughed when we read out the charges.”
Harry’s expression hardened.
“And you think that means you get to become the executioner?”
The words hit.
Not because they were cruel.
Because they were close.
Hermione looked down at her wand.
She remembered other things then. Small things. Old things. A bluebell flame licking at a teacher’s robes. A beetle trapped in glass. A girl’s face marked forever for betraying a secret. Her parents’ blank eyes after she had taken herself out of their lives because she had decided she knew best.
For the greater good.
No.
Not that phrase.
Never that phrase.
“I didn’t hex him through a wall,” she said tightly.
Harry sighed. “No. You stopped just before you did. But I know you 'Mione. Everyone else might've missed it. But you can't lie to me.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and signed deeply again. “Let me see your arm. Please” He asked Hermione without bothering to look up at her.
“I’m. Fine.” Hermione ground out, anger spiking.
“Stop saying that.” His voice cracked.
That did what anger had not.
Hermione looked at him.
Harry’s hand was shaking, leg bouncing on the ball of his foot beneath the desk.
She let him take her wrist.
She hated having her wrists, her arms, touched in any way. After Malfoy Manor. She just, couldn't. Couldn't bear to feel restrained.
The mark, that word, no Healer could remove it. Sometimes, Hermione wanted to walk around with it out in the open. She wanted to scream at people to look at it, look at her, look at what had been done to them. The heroes of the Wizarding War.
Children.
Broken, scarred children.
But, more than she wanted people to look, she wanted no one to ever look at her ever again either. To not see the still red and angry slurr carved in to her flesh.
Lifting her sleeve slightly, she bared her arm for Harry, and did her utmost not to flinch when he touched her.
There, beneath the skin, just where the woman had touched her, was a pale silver mark.
Thin as thread.
Fading already.
Harry stared at it, his fingers stretching the delicate flesh gently to see better.
Hermione tried to breathe.
“Did you know her?” Harry asked.
Hermione shook her head. “No.”
But that was not entirely true.
Because, if she had something to do with that case, Hermione did know her. She knew her intimately. She had stolen any shred of peace, along with any hope of sound sleep, Hermione had.
Harry kept hold of Hermione’s wrist.
Too tightly now. Stopping any movement. Hermione glanced at where he still gripped, her breath shallowing. He let go immediately.
“You’re coming to mine tonight,” he said.
It was not a question.
“Harry—”
“You are coming to mine. Ginny’s cooking. Teddy’s there. You’re going to eat something, drink tea, and pretend for one evening that you are a human being rather than a Ministry function with an astounding amount of hair.”
Despite everything, despite the corpse on the floor in the other room and the silver mark on her skin and the terrible emptiness pressing against the walls, Hermione almost laughed.
Almost.
“I should go home.”
Harry’s expression softened in a way she hated.
“Is Ron there?”
Hermione looked away.
That answered enough.
Harry said nothing.
That stung too.
Everyone knew.
Ron was not cruel. That was the trouble. Cruel would have been simpler. Cruel could be named, fought, left. Ron wasn't that at all. Ron almost definitely wasn't even bad either.
Ron was tired.
Ron was distant.
Ron loved her, probably.
And Hermione loved him, probably.
But lately their flat had become a place where conversations went to die. They moved around each other like people trying not to wake a sleeping creature. They snapped over nothing. Apologised badly. Slept back to back. Made jokes in front of friends and fell silent the moment they were alone.
A marriage built from war could survive many things, Hermione thought.
Peace, apparently, was not one of them.
“I have paperwork,” she said.
Harry gave her a look so reminiscent of McGonagall that it was frankly offensive.
“‘Mione.” Harry implored, gently.
“I need to write up what happened.”
“You need to stop.”
She almost told him she couldn’t.
The words rose to her tongue.
I can’t stop.
If I stop, I’ll think.
If I think, I’ll remember the children.
If I remember the children, I’ll remember what I promised them.
If I remember what I promised them, I’ll have to admit I failed.
Instead, she pulled her sleeve sharply down over her wrist and stepped away from Harry's desk.
“I’ll come for dinner,” she said.
Harry looked surprised.
So was she.
“Good.” He said, a slight smile ghosting at the corner of his mouth. How long had it been since the Wizarding World's saviour had smiled with abandon? How long since she had?
“But I am writing the report first.”
“Hermione.”
“Harry.”
They stared at one another.
He sighed.
“Fine. One hour.”
“Two.”
“One.”
“Ninety minutes.”
“Sixty-five.”
“You’re a terrible negotiator.”
“You’re a terrible patient.”
“I’m not a patient.”
“You had magical corpse residue on your wrist thirty seconds ago.”
She winced. “That is a disgusting phrase.”
“And yet, an accurate one.”
“It is absolutely not accurate.”
For one fragile second, they were almost themselves. The moment passed.
Hermione looked away.
Beyond the privacy charm, beyond the interrogation room, beyond the Ministry and its endless corridors of polished stone and polished lies, the world went on as though nothing had shifted.
But something had.
She could feel it.
A thread had been pulled loose somewhere.
And whatever was at the other end had noticed her.
That evening, when she had finished her reports, one and a half hours later, Hermione finally left the Ministry, the silver mark on her wrist completely gone.
But the skin still ached a little. Like when you touched something so cold it stung and, when she closed her eyes, in the lift, just for a second, she heard the woman’s voice again.
Not mine.
Magic.
The lift doors opened onto the Atrium.
Hermione stepped out, exhausted to the bone, and found Ron waiting by the fountain.
For a moment, hope rose foolishly in her chest.
Then she saw his expression.
Not worry.
Not really.
Irritation.
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve been waiting thirty minutes.”
Hermione looked at him.
At her husband.
At the man who had once held her hand in the ruins of a castle while the world remade itself around them.
She wanted to tell him about the woman.
About the magic.
About the mark.
About the fact that something terrible was coming and she could feel it beneath her skin.
Instead, she said, “I’m sorry.”
Ron pushed a hand through his firey hair. “Harry sent me a Patronus. Said you were coming to theirs.”
“Yes.”
“You could’ve told me.”
“I only just decided.”
He glanced past her, towards the lifts. “Bad day?”
Hermione laughed.
Once.
It came out wrong.
Ron’s face shifted. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Hermione—”
“I said I’m sorry.”
There it was again.
That brittle thing between them.
Not hatred.
Not even anger, really.
Just weariness sharpened until it could cut.
Ron looked at her for a long moment, then sighed, his large shoulders raising and falling in an exaggerated motion. Though not quite as tall as Charlie, Ron had ended up being the broadest of the Weasley boys, and second tallest behind Charlie. Though he still held himself clumsily at times, lacking Fred's grace or Bill's quiet confidence, Hermione could remember a time when Ron's broad frame had felt like safety around her, shielding her from the world. She could remember the memory of it, but she couldn't bring back the feeling.
Now, his large presence felt oppressive. Taking up all the space until she couldn't even breathe.
“Fine. Go to Harry’s. I’ll see you at home”. Ron leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
It was quick.
Habitual.
Kind, almost.
Then he walked away.
Hermione stood in the Atrium, beneath the golden statues and the glittering lights, and watched him go.
Around her, witches and wizards hurried home. She wondered how many of them knew where that was. If there were any among their number, like her, where the place they lived no longer felt like going home. Did any of them feel homesickness for a place they couldn't name too?
Then she drew her cloak tighter around herself and turned towards the Floos.
Harry and Ginny’s, then.
Tea.
Dinner.
Questions she did not want to answer.
And somewhere beyond all of it, though she did not know it yet, a castle in Scotland waited beneath a bruised summer sky.
Not home.
Not anymore.
Not yet.