Bloodline
Disclaimer: To my eternal annoyance, I am not being paid to write fanfiction. If I were, I would quit my job, drop out of school, and spend the next twenty years breeding plotbunnies. Er, anyway. JKR owns the characters and the settings you recognize, and well as what's "really" going to happen. She's very kindly allowed loons like me to play with them, and We Praise Her For It. I seem to recall that the movie people have some sort of rights, too, so genuflections to them as well.
Chapter Description: The major players are introduced, plans rise and fail, and Hermione has a little problem.
Author's Note: I have entirely too much fun using fanfic cliches dipped in sarcasm--ten points for each one you can spot! ;)
The problem with running a resistance movement, Severus Snape thought irritably, was that the existing regime just wasn't that bad for most people. True, the wizarding world was run by an evil overlord with dreams of everlasting life and an unsettling penchant for indiscriminant torture, but for the average witch or wizard, there really wasn't all that much to complain about. Unless you found yourself the subject of one of the Dark Lord's pet breeding projects, life went on much as it had before. And that, of course, was the crux of his problem. As if allowing himself to be placed in charge of a school full of self-important little snots wasn't enough, he had been ordered to continue the Snape line and provide Voldemort with another brood of faithful followers.
His day improved a bit at the expense of Charlie Gibbons and Caroline Derwent-Jones, a pair of third years who had decided to brighten their own days by casting former-Unforgivables at their classmates in the hall. He would have liked to expel them for their rank disobedience, but they were Bloodline children and virtually untouchable. Deciding to leave them in suspense about their actual punishment, he fixed them with a black glare.
"Explain yourselves."
They squirmed in their seats. Excellent. Miss Derwent-Jones made a few gulping noises, and Mister Gibbons developed a sudden interest in his shoelaces.
"Well? Speak up, I don't have all day." He did, actually. Paperwork was miniscule now that the Ministry had been "reorganized", and his private projects were, to be frank, not going well.
"Um, well, I, er, we..."
"Yes?"
"Wewerejustpracticing," Gibbons squeaked.
"And you felt that despite my clear warnings on the subject the hallway was the appropriate place for it?"
They avoided his gaze. Miss Derwent-Jones found her voice first, having apparently decided to brazen it out. She jerked her chin up, and met his eye with only a small flinch.
"Ashton offended me, and I was well within my rights to put him in his place. He is only half-blood, after all."
"Your rights, Miss Jones? I imagine one could count stupidity as a right."
Her nostrils flared as she huffed, offended. Gibbons only looked confused.
He sighed. "Mister Ashton is also a member of Hufflepuff, is he not? Would you enjoy waking up to a face full of boils?"
As a threat, it worked nicely. The girl looked ready to cry, and the boy shifted uncomfortably.
"I leave you to the consequences of your actions, then. You will report to Mister Filch after dinner every day until the next Hogsmeade weekend. Now get back to your dormitories."
They ran. He heard a squeak of dismay, and then Filch entered. He nearly chuckled at the irony. Nearly.
"Can I help you, Argus?"
The caretaker tossed a brightly-colored package onto his desk. "Contraband," he said. Emblazoned across the front of the bag was 'AIRHEADS'.
"Crickman wanted to feed them to the whole of Gryffindor!" Filch rubbed his hands in anticipation.
"Very well. Have him come to my office tomorrow morning immediately after breakfast."
Interesting, he thought, as the echoes of Argus' footfalls on the circular stair grew fainter. Somehow, Muggle candy was getting through the barriers---if he played his cards right, there might be a way to reach the five outside. He smiled to himself, and began writing.
---
Harry Potter was in a piss-poor mood. His flatmates had finally tired of his ranting and had turned him out to spew his vitriol on someone else. Spew, he mused. Hermione's passion for lost causes had certainly transferred well to their new station. He could not imagine how anyone else could see the curse that had stripped their magic from them as a "temporary inconvenience", but Hermione did. She poked and prodded their compatriots out of bed every morning to act as guinea pigs in her experiments, ignoring groans of protest from her former professors, whose age had caught up with them without magic to sustain their good health. Clever of him, Harry thought, to sentence his worst enemies to the discomforts of old age, slowly sapping their will to resist.
Still, Voldemort had always underestimated Muggles, and they'd done their best to exploit that weakness. Too bad they'd---he'd---been caught. He grimaced again at the thought of his failure. He'd been so sure that the contact was clean, that the plan was flawless. Honestly, how could he have predicted there would be a magical Mafia? Well, Hermione certainly had. He touched his ears gently, remembering her shriek of rage when she'd found out what he'd done. He'd been justified in yelling back---after all, he was the one who'd suffered for it, and he'd be damned if he'd undergo another interrogation.
He spotted a trendy café at the end of the block. He'd sit, he thought, and write it out. Maybe he could make sense of what had gone wrong. Maybe he could get Hermione off his back long enough to start a new scheme with the lessons he'd learned. Hey, and if all else failed, he could disguise a few names and sell it as his memoirs. For the first time in days, Harry smiled. It was a sneering, self-deprecating smile, but it was definitely there. He bought a mocha and set pen to napkin.
---
"Pedigree genetics is anything but an exact science," Professor Callahan told the class. "As you've read in your textbooks, hemophilia spread quickly through the royal families of Europe, appearing first in the children of Queen Victoria. The explanation commonly given is that she (or one of her parents) was born with a spontaneous mutation, but---and this is the difficulty with pedigrees---there are...other...explanations." He wiggled his eyebrows, and the class laughed appreciatively.
The joke was lost on Hermione, who was scribbling madly in the notebook in front of her. As she wrote, she ran the tips of her unoccupied fingers over her forehead, worrying at an unseen mark. She could always feel the brand on her forehead. Omega. Symbol of the Frenum Copulaque. Outward mark of her stymied magic. She did look up when the class began filing out. Time to go to the lab.
It was highly unusual for an undergraduate to have control over her own project, much less dedicated lab space, but Dumbledore had friends in high places. Very high places. Anyone, it seemed, could get lab space with a healthy government grant to her name.
"Morning, Mione!" Amanda Bertram called. Dr. Baldwin's overworked technician had a bottomless supply of good cheer, a trait which alternately amused and annoyed the collection of graduate students and post-docs who made use of her talents. Hermione gave a friendly wave as she passed Amanda's bench.
"Your blood samples are in the cold room," Amanda told her. "I went ahead and thawed them for you when they came in."
"Thanks, Amanda. What would I do without you?"
"Sleep in the lab, I imagine!" she laughed.
It wasn't really a joke, Hermione mused as she prepared her slides. She'd avoided all-nighters so far, but she knew the minute she had a breakthrough, she might as well take up residence.
The blood samples were, as promised, on ice in the cold room. They were labeled with the four indexes Hermione had spent her first year without magic developing. Two dealt with heritage---wizarding percentage to six generations and percentage and type of any nonhuman ancestry---and the other two dealt with magical ability. The ancestry indices had been easy to develop, once she discovered an abandoned project to cross-reference Muggle and wizarding birth records, but quantifying magical ability had been a murky business of guesswork and supposition. In the end, though, she had compiled a fairly extensive set of pedigrees, and short of exhumation there was little she could do to acquire bodily samples of the individuals she had tracked.
She let her mind wander as she went through her routine: aliquot and label the samples, mark two for tissue culture, two for permanent storage, and send the rest to the minus-80 freezer. So far her results had been precisely nil. There were no visible structures in the blood that might account for its ritual power, and it would be months before the genetic analysis could be expected to show anything. Still, she had high hopes. She and Ron had joined forces to write a program that would (hopefully) identify likely genes---ones that were active in magical samples and inactive in Muggle or cursed ones. She smiled at the thought of Ron. Who would have guessed that losing his magic would land him in a place where his talents could really shine?
"Good morning."
She looked up from her work, and the whole world collapsed to a single point. Pale, pale skin, shining in the florescent glare, stretched tight over a skull, shot through with blue veins. It was him, she knew it, and she stepped forward.
He turned around. "Hermione? Are you okay?"
She blinked. China blue eyes, not red. There, she was steadier.
"You shaved your head," she said, unnecessarily. She was focusing on Tom now, who had a normal human nose and black eyebrows, and the dizzy feeling was beginning to fade.
"Big change," he muttered, running a hand over his scalp. "Do you think it looks okay?"
She managed a smile. "Looks great. Very modern." He seemed relieved, unloading his tubes from the centrifuge wordlessly. He shifted on his feet as he worked, and the soft sound of his jeans rubbing together kept time in the quiet room. He left a few minutes later with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, as if to keep them from reaching for hair he no longer had.
Without Tom's anxious presence making the small space uncomfortably public, Hermione could think more clearly. The last time this had happened was at Halloween, when Ron came home wearing custom contacts. His "Voldemort costume" unnerved them all, but judging by the others' unsteady humor, she was the only one who'd actually felt the pull. She'd been much worse that time, she remembered---her death grip on the counter was the only thing that kept her from kneeling before those red eyes. This time, at least, she'd been able to wrest some control away from the feelings. It infuriated her, this violation of her mind, this foreign desire to obey her worst enemy. What did he want with her mind, anyway, when he'd closed the doors to the wizarding world?
She glared at her blood samples. She would remove this curse, whether she had magic at her disposal or not.
---
It had begun with Dumbledore eating a lemon drop. Granted, a great many things had begun that way, but what made this one special was the far-flung effects it had in my life, both for good and for evil.
Well, no. That wasn't the beginning, really. Dumbledore's not-so-subtle hint had just been the resolution of a very big and loud fight with Ron. Like most blowups between friends, it had begun with something really stupid.
"God-DAMNIT!" Ron had yelled. "If you don't stop moaning about not saving the world and get a fucking job already, I'll evict you myself! The least you can do, O-Living-One, is make a contribution to the rent!"
Okay, maybe it wasn't that stupid.
I argued with him, of course. After all, I was supposed to be the savior of the wizarding world, I had failed at my one true purpose, life had no meaning, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And when I had replayed my whole sob story, I really expected him to leave me alone.
Ha. I had forgotten that Ron Weasley was raised by Molly Weasley, and thus was no slouch in the guilt-tripping OR the yelling department. Needless to say, he made my ears ring until I got my sorry ass out of bed and started looking for a job.
Harry laughed over his account. It seemed much less traumatic like that. Of course, he hadn't gotten to his great failure yet, but it was time to call Hermione and make amends. He supposed he did still resent that she had called him on his bad planning and berated him for it, but it had been wrong of him to question her loyalty. If there was anything he could always count on from Hermione, it was caring. Yes, it was definitely time to apologize.
---
Difficulty hearing often accompanied Hermione's absorption in a particularly messy problem, so it wasn't until Amanda was hovering over her shoulder that she understood what she was saying.
"Mione, Harry's on the phone. He says it's an emergency."
She snatched it from the technician's hand.
"Harry, what's wrong?"
"You have to get here now-Dumbledore's collapsed!"
"Okay, I'll be there as soon as I can. The hospital number's on the fridge; call them right away."
"I will. Please, just hurry."
He hung up.
She grabbed her bag, and the phone rang again.
"Baldwin lab."
"Hermione?"
"Harry? I thought you were calling the hospital. What happened?"
"Hospital? Who's sick? What's going on?"
There was a long pause.
"Hermione?"
"Whatever you do, Harry, do not go home. Someone called from the flat with your voice. He said that Dumbledore collapsed and wanted me to come right away."